Russia’s Baikal processor will be built around an ARM Cortex A57, which ties into Vladimir Putin’s goal, established in 2010, to move all government computers over to Linux – another move that’s easy to understand given the OS’ open-source and modular nature.
The Asus C200 Chromebook is a 2.5 pound laptop that offers up to 12 hours of battery life and sells for just $249. It’s not the fastest notebook around, doesn’t have the best screen, and some folks might find Google’s Chrome OS operating system limiting. But there’s a lot to like about this little laptop… especially given the low price.
The Yocto project provides a set of tools to build custom distribution images from scratch. When using Yocto, the image, and all the tooling used to build the image, is built from recipes. These recipes are parsed using the bitbake command. The recipes have dependencies, just as ordinary packages in a classical distro. By pointing to an image recipe, a dependency tree will be constructed and a large number of packages will be downloaded, built and then assembled into a single image.
Linus Torvalds released Linux 3.16-rc2 on Saturday night rather than a conventional Sunday afternoon release due to obligations he has this week, but regardless, there’s still many changes to find with this weekly kernel update.
It’s a day early, but tomorrow ends up being inconvenient for me due
to being on the road most of the day, so here you are. These days most
people send me their pull requests and patches during the week, so
it’s not like I expect that a Sunday release would have made much of a
difference. And it’s also not like I didn’t have enough changes for
making a rc2 release.
Anyway, enough excuses. 3.16-rc2 is out, and contains the usual
assortment of fixes all over the map. The most unusual part at this
point is how the sparc changes stand out (at almost 40% of the patch
by bulk), but they are basically all just sparse warning cleanups.
Similarly, some Nouveau drm changes standing out size-wise, but again
those are largely due to small firmware fixes resulting in big
generated changes. The actual real changes are fairly small.
Ignoring those two unusually large changes (in lines), everything else
looks fairly normal. There are driver changes, some tooling updates
(particularly perf), and various other arch updates (arm, s390,
unicore32, x86..). And just misc random stuff all over the place -
rtmutex, btrfs, yadda yadda.
The shortlog is not tiny, but small enough to include here, so you can
see the details there if you care.
In trying to reduce tearing and match the behavior of the Intel and Radeon drivers, the Nouveau X.Org driver will now sync buffer-swaps to vblanks by default.
Support for running Wayland’s Weston compositor directly off the DRM kernel driver for the NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC found within the Jetson TK1 development board has been proposed for mainline Weston.
One of the first desktop “docks” is now available for Wayland!
Announced yesterday was that Cairo-Dock has been ported to Wayland. There’s now basic support for using the popular open-source dock on Weston 1.5 with various desklets.
When Eric Anholt announced last week he was developing a Broadcom VC4 DRM plus OpenGL driver he said originally he plans to develop the user-space GL driver as a Gallium3D driver but might later turn it into a classic Mesa driver.
Our latest Debian GNU/Linux benchmarks following the recent GNU/kFreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux comparison are benchmarks of Debian GNU/Linux in its latest testing form for 8.0 “Jessie” compared to a stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS plus with an assortment of updates.
Back in 2012 with the NVIDIA 310 Linux driver series a threaded OpenGL optimization was added to the proprietary graphics driver. When this driver premiered we tested NVIDIA’s Linux threaded OpenGL optimizations to mixed results. We’re back now re-testing the OpenGL threaded optimizations to see if it makes any more of a difference now with modern Linux games and OpenGL workloads while using the latest 337.25 Linux driver.
After having some interesting discussions last week around KVM and Xen performance improvements over the past years, I decided to do a little research on my own. The last complete set of benchmarks I could find were from the Phoronix Haswell tests in 2013. There were some other benchmarks from 2011 but those were hotly debated due to the Xen patches headed into kernel 3.0.
The popular Vim editor provides users with a vast set of features from the get-go, and you can further enhance its capabilities via plugins. If you’re a programmer, check out the following plugins, which can help you do things such as check syntax errors from within the code, browse the source code, and switch to the header file corresponding to the current file.
The Linux terminal can be a complex beast, and it would be handy to have something like Siri to help make things easier. Sure, there’s often no need to go into the terminal for regular users, but there are some advantages to using the terminal over the graphical user interface. You can do a lot of things with the terminal that aren’t as easy to do in graphical user interfaces – besides, there’s just this odd nerdy pleasure in doing as much as possible from a command line interface.
Snappy is a minimal application that does one thing — plays videos. Snappy is a super-minimal video player with a neat on-screen display, and that’s about it, here is no other interface in the application. Snappy has no library feature that keeps all your videos, no list of previously played videos, no menus, not even a open video dialog — to play a video, you either tell a video to open in snappy via your file browser or drag and drop a video file to the snappy window. Snappy is also built on the GStreamer framework, so it will support any files that you have GStreamer plugins for.
Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) offer exceptional gaming capabilities, and have contributed to the trend of astonishing leaps in graphics fidelity. There is not a year that has gone by without a game being released that makes significant advances in technical graphics wizardry. Computer graphics have been advancing at a staggering pace. At the current rate of progress, in the next 10 years it may not be possible to distinguish computer graphics from reality.
Scott Ludwig of Valve shared some details this weekend about a new release of the Steam Runtime SDK they’re working towards to improve the Linux gaming experience.
If you love slow-paced but nail-biting turn-based strategy, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a brilliant buy. It brings tactical battles, base management, alien technology research and soldier levelling together in one glorious package that will challenge your brain rather than your reflexes. If you see it on sale, snap it up, you won’t regret it. Also, it’s now available for SteamOS and Linux – which is ace.
Unlike a lot of studies before, for the first time, we did not get enough participants. In the mobile broadband study only 22 users participated (Wireless: 113, Wired: 96), while more than 29 answers would have been required for stable results in this study. Furthermore, we do have problems to understand the results and transform them into the desired structure for the UI. But take a look yourself:
The Randa meetings provide an excellent opportunity for KDE developers to come across for a week long hack session to fix bugs in various KDE components while collaborating on new features.
Icon sets for Linux, especially for the KDE’s Plasma desktop, have usually been scarce, with not so many themes being complete nor good looking. Oxygen icon set looks and feels outdated, and Faenza and Kfaenza mods from different people over the past years gradually morphed into frankenstein projects. There have been attempts at completing icon sets that would give your desktop some crispness and freshness, but many of them, despite being well designed and though out, lack many commonly used app icons, or monochrome tray icons, or, well, take your pick, you probably went through the same experience as I did.
One of the things I’ve been asked recently quite often is about where’s the information regaring the needed port to KF5. I’ll use this blog post as reference.
As an pronunciation trainer, Artikulate does not only need sound output, but also sound input. For sound output the (Linux) world is kind of simple and it only costs some lines of code to integrate Phonon or a similar framework into your application. For sound input it is trickier, especially if you do not want to work with a C-style API (when coding a C++/Qt application, C-style API feels very strange). The solution to this problem is QtGStreamer, which provides Qt-style C++ bindings for GStreamer, and hence access to the currently best multimedia framework.
Current versions of Qt5 with Wayland support don’t support minimizing/hiding windows. However, patches have now been merged into Qt Wayland for addressing this shortcoming.
First, torrents aren’t available, since 1. that requires dedicated tracker software, which isn’t needed since 2. KDE doesn’t distribute many large files.
While most of the world is turned towards Brazil to enjoy the World Cup, Mageia has been preparing its own major worldwide event: Mageia 4.1 has been released!
Mageia 4.1, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and that is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has been release and is now available for download.
The submission phase for the supplemental wallpaper for Fedora 21 is now half over. Some already asked me for the status and most wanted also to see what is submitted. But we decided not to show them until after the voting, to avoid that people vote only for people they know instead of the quality of the submission.
Inside the Orange Box, you’ll find ten Intel micro-servers. Each is powered by Ivy Bridge i5-3427U CPUs. Every one of these mini-servers has four cores, Intel HD Graphics 4000, 16GBs of DDR3 RAM, a 128GB SSD root disk, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The first micro-server also includes a Centrino Advanced-N 6235 Wi-Fi Adapter, and 2TB Western Digital hard drive. These are all connected in a cluster with a D-Link Gigabit switch.
Last week Eric Anholt left Intel’s Linux graphics driver team to go work for Broadcom developing a VC4 DRM/KMS and Gallium3D driver for the GPU that supports the Raspberry Pi.
Telecom service providers are being asked in multiple ways to put their money where their mouths are when it comes to supporting open source software and technology in the move to virtualization.
The most obvious move those willing to embrace openness will make is joining the new open source project — called Open Platform for NFV, or OPN — that a number of telecom operators associated with the ETSI Network Functions Virtualization Industry Specification Group are setting up with the Linux Foundation , already home to OpenDaylight . (See Is Open Source the New De Facto Standard?)
Mozilla took the world by surprised when it announced that it was developing a Firefox operating system that would be used for mobile phones, especially in developing markets. Now, there are already a few devices out there, but it seems that this isn’t the last step for the company whose name is still associated with the famous web browsers.
Haven given that warning, I still think there’s good value in project statistics. They say something about trajectory, and when used in conjunction with solid knowledge of why the numbers are what they are, they can tell a good bit about comparative success. And they can be inspiring. “Look what we’ve done” you can say to your community, as you provide them with the raw data about what they’ve created. They can also say something about the relative participation in a project, as with Chuck Dubuque’s look at how to gauge the contributions of the various corporate contributors to OpenStack.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. In general, it is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) operating system for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public, private and hybrid clouds.
I could not disagree more with Dvorak. One of the things I always hated when I was in school was having to sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher drone on endlessly about a subject. It felt like it was taking forever for them to get to the point and present the information. Really, I remember doodling on my notebook while the teacher went on and on in what seemed like an endless monologue about whatever.
Maybe that was just my perception at the time (I graduated high school back in 1987), but I would much rather have had faster access to all of the course information rather than waiting for the teacher to regurgitate it verbally to me. Oral communication in person is such a slow and ponderous way to transfer information compared to what you can do with today’s computers and tablets.
While many researchers encounter no privacy-based barriers to releasing data, those working with human participants, such as doctors, psychologists, and geneticists, have a difficult problem to surmount. How do they reconcile their desire to share data, allowing their analyses and conclusions to be verified, with the need to protect participant privacy? It’s a dilemma we’ve talked about before on the blog (see: Open Data and IRBs, Privacy and Open Data). A new project, Open Humans, seeks to resolve the issue by finding patients who are willing—even eager—to share their personal data.
The first RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.
The GCC steering committee has ruled on allowing a foreign library for compute offloading into the GNU Compiler Collection.
The first library in question is the poorly named “liboffload”, which handles offloading work to Intel’s high-end Xeon Phi compute cards. Permission was needed from the GCC steering committee for introducing a foreign library plus that there’s some GPLv2.1 header files and new sources.
It is striking that, despite talking a lot about freedom, and often being interested in the question of who controls power, these five criteria might as well be (Athenian) Greek to most free software communities and participants- the question of liberty begins and ends with source code, and has nothing to say about organizational structure and decision-making – critical questions serious philosophers always address.
Our licensing, of course, means that in theory points #4 and #5 are satisfied, but saying “you can submit a patch” is, for most people, roughly as satisfying as saying “you could buy a TV ad” to an American voter concerned about the impact of wealth on our elections. Yes, we all have the theoretical option to buy a TV ad/edit our code, but for most voters/users of software that option will always remain theoretical. We’re probably even further from satisfying #1, #2, and #3 in most projects, though one could see the Ada Initiative and GNOME OPW as attempts to deal with some aspects of #1, #3, and #4
To this extent, the argument between LLVM and GCC is a retread of the historic differences between GNU/Linux and the BSDs, between ‘open source’ and free software. Open source developers allow the code to be reused in any context, free or proprietary. Free software is restrictive in that it insists that the code, and any modifications to the code, must remain free in perpetuity. Advocates of free software would argue that the integrity of copyleft licensing has been instrumental in the spread of GCC, and has taken Linux and free software into places it would not otherwise have reached, and that free software cannot be bought or corrupted by commercial or corporate interests. Open source advocates argue that open source is more free because the user has no restrictions and can do what he or she likes, including developing closed source versions of the code.
If the Narendra Modi government has its way, India is all set to see a perceptible change in primary health facilities across the country. According to Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare Dr Harsh Vardhan, the health ministry aims to provide 50 essential generic medicines from “birth to death” to all Indian citizens.
In an age of surveillance anxiety, the notion of leaving your Wi-Fi network open and unprotected seems dangerously naive. But one group of activists says it can help you open up your wireless internet and not only maintain your privacy, but actually increase it in the process.
The impact open source hardware has had in the past year has been momentous. Educators, students and hobbyists have all traditionally been big proponents of open-source hardware, but in the last 12 months we finally saw large companies and professional engineers begin to openly embrace the open source movement as well.
PHP 5.6 is on track for its official release this summer as a major update to PHP5 while those looking to do some pre-production testing, RC1 is now available.
Web frameworks have gotten much more powerful since the original Freshmeat was built 17 years ago; today, I think building a replacement wouldn’t be a huge project. It is not, however, something I am willing to try to do alone. Whether or not this goes forward will depend on how many people are willing to step up and join me. I figure we need a team of about three core co-developers, at least one of whom needs to have some prior expertise at whatever framework we end up using.
The concept is interesting. Distros do a lot of similar things as does Sourceforge, GitHub and Distrowatch. A site specializing in distributing release-announcements could have a niche. On the one hand, with the millions of projects that might use the service, the site might be too busy to be useful. On the other hand, a good search engine might make the site scale well. Perhaps Google could provide the searching function.
Finally receiving some mainline treatment within Mesa this Sunday is the start of Chris Forbes’ long work-in-progress patches concerning ARB_fragment_layer_viewport.
Today is the Midsummer Solstice, which has been celebrated as a holy day by most religions throughout human history. and is also recognized by science as one of the four special days in the solar year.
Kopimism is one of Sweden’s newest religions. On or about the winter solstice of 2011, the Swedish authority Kammarkollegiet — blessed be its name! — officially recognized by Kopimism as a religion, just like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and others.
On Thursday, the United Kingdom expanded its ban on the teaching of creationism from all state schools, to all state schools as well as semi-private Free Schools and Academies.
Suspicion increased when Dr Shakeel Afridi was revealed to have been running a fake hepatitis vaccination programme for the CIA to help in its search for Osama bin Laden. Now with deaths that can be linked to a vaccine, and that too a vaccine purchased from India, our public health goals will be that much harder to achieve. Those responsible for the deaths should of course be held responsible but it will now become very difficult to contain the damage they have caused.
A decade after it was declared operational for bogus political reasons – “you just needed to build them” – the $40 billion Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, or GMD, “cannot be relied on,” says a blistering report from the L.A. Times. It has an “abysmal” record: It has failed more tests than it has passed, has “performed less well than people had hoped,” has been hyped by U.S. officials who claimed it was more reliable than it was, has failed tests far less stringent than real-life scenarios would be, and over time has continued to perform worse, not better, despite years of tinkering, failing five of its last eight tests. It was also designed for a threat that likely doesn’t exist, or in the immortal words of Charles Pierce, “not to defend ourselves against missiles but, rather, as a platform for international dick-waving.” Oh yes, and members of Congress – the guys who battled over how much to cut food stamps – want a bunch more.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently stated that air strikes and drones should be used once again on Iraq to stem recent gains by extremists in that country. Mr. Blair is oblivious of the responsibility he shares with former U.S. president George W. Bush on account of one of the most serious breaches of international law in recent times. The prosecution of Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush, along the lines of similar trials conducted in Argentina, Chile and Peru, is the only fitting response to such careless remarks.
All able-bodied South Korean men must serve about two years in the military under a conscription system aimed at countering aggression from North Korea.
In 1981, my first professor in political science, the late Dr. Charles Benjamin, explained that roll-back-the-clock was the plan of the new Ronald Reagan administration in terms of American foreign policy. We had just come out of the Carter era–the only time that USA presidential leadership had sincerely tried to put the CIA and NSA leadership in their societal places (subservient to the executive branch and constitution) and had unveiled a practicing Human-Rights policy that would support popular people’s rebellions against dictators around the globe. During the Carter term, from Central America to the Middle East, the USA foreign policy had allowed people’s movements to have their day in the sun.
The former vice president got his comeuppance on Fox News last Wednesday, producing a minor news story.
Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating renewed U.S. military involvement in Ira to prevent a seizure of power by the al-Qaeda spin-off ISIS (or ISIL) and opining, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Citing this comment, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly unexpectedly snapped, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir.” She referred specifically the false accusation about weapons of mass destruction used to sell the Iraq War. A flustered Cheney fumbled his interrogator’s name (“Reagan, um, Megyn”) before declaring, “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record.” (As though Megyn were doing something other than precisely that.) “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction. … Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to.”
In other words, the unfortunately mistaken but universal belief in Saddam’s WMD preceded the Bush-Cheney administration, was part of its heritage but in no way its invention. Everybody was honestly mistaken. Thus he utterly rejects personal responsibility for crediting, promoting it, and using it to justify a war he badly wanted.
“Do you think Dick Cheney is a credible critic of this president?” host David Gregory asked Paul, quoting from Cheney’s op-ed in which Cheney wrote, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”
Two types of drones — the MQ-1C Gray Eagle and the RQ-7 Shadow — began flying in tandem with the Apaches. The drones’ cameras and sensors transmit the intelligence to the Apache crew — showing it what lies over the hill so the Apaches don’t have to expose themselves to find a target to attack or don’t fly into an ambush.
New Zealand has no issue with US drones striking terrorists in Iraq, PM John Key told TV1′s Q+A this morning.
“They sometimes go wrong and that’s a great tragedy.
“On balance of benefit, are they more often right than they’re wrong? I think the answer is ‘yes’,” he said following a meeting with US President Barack Obama.
President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that the United States is “prepared to take targeted and precise military action” in Iraq if the situation on the ground requires it. The president added that if he decides to take military action in Iraq, he would consult with Congress and world leaders.
In response to consolidated lawsuits filed by the ACLU and The New York Times, the Second Circuit recently ordered the Obama administration to disclose (with redactions) one of the legal memos authorizing the government’s premeditated killing of Anwar al-Aulaqi, an American citizen. The government has challenged certain aspects of the court’s decision, apparently with some degree of success (more on that below), and it has managed to defer the release of the memo by two months. To its credit, though, the court appears unwilling to allow the government to delay the release of the memo indefinitely. If the court holds to a plan it set forth ten days ago, it will publish the memo itself this coming week.
Communities Digital News published a report outlining strong circumstantial evidence that arms transferred from the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi before the attack on September 11, 2012, ended up in Syria and are now being used against the Iraq government. Media reports and Pentagon / State Department statements have confirmed that U.S. weapons are being deployed by ISIS in Iraq.
More disturbing information is emerging to bookend these revelations. The United States probably trained elements of the ISIS militia, which has accounted for the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Syria and now in Iraq.
hen again one only has to remember the MSM basically cheering on the the preemptive illegal invasion and all the breathless bullshit emanating from “embedded” journalists to see how effing useless they are.
The Sunday Mirror columnist and former Deputy Prime Minister says it’s time to learn from the past and leave Iraq and its neighbours to sort out this mess
Treating “the US troop surge worked” argument as a fact, as Engel is doing, is very dangerous–since it logically suggests that it is only the presence of US troops that can keep Iraq safe. That is a recipe for a never-ending war.
When it comes to US foreign policy and warmaking in the Middle East, you’re not supposed to talk about oil. To suggest it plays a serious role in US decision-making is to invite taunting about conspiracy theories.
It was the bolded text that was of biggest interest because as we noted the next day, when discussing the next steps for ISIS, we said that “One wonders how long until the mercenary force finds its latest major backer, because for all the western, US-led intervention, both Russia and China are oddly missing from the scene. We expect that to change soon.”
Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)? How many times does the Beltway hawk caucus get to be wrong before we recognize that maybe, just maybe, its members don’t know what they’re talking about?
“Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war,” wrote Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. For many people in Brazil, a war has indeed broken out surrounding the current World Cup. Poor communities have been displaced by stadiums and related infrastructure for the event, the high level of security has increased police violence, and the enormous economic costs of the World Cup are seen by many as a blow against the rights of the country’s most impoverished people. As a result of these controversies, the international sports event has been met with wide-spread protests.
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, felt that despite being a small nation, Ecuador can pursue the cessation of US mass espionage against its citizens, according to an interview published here today.
The Australian publisher and journalist considered that Ecuador can pass laws to mandate that companies providing services within the country use audited industrial standard encryption by default.
In an interview with the El Telegrafo, Assange said the best model for small nations like Ecuador is the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which aimed to make Iceland into a competitive jurisdiction among the market of jurisdictions for companies wishing to provide internet services.
WikiLeaks has been rather quiet recently — probably something to do with Julian Assange being stuck in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for the last two years. But today, we saw a flash of the old, dangerous WikiLeaks, with its publication of a major leak concerning the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA). Although Techdirt wrote about this in April, for many this is the first time they have heard about this secretive deal, which has probably come as something of a shock given the global scale of its ambitions and its likely impact.
Prime minister Tony Abbott is holding secret trade negotiations to fundamentally deregulate Australia’s banking and finance sector, according to WikiLeaks documents.
The Australian publisher and journalist, best known as the editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, recently revealed in a reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), that he has long supported bitcoin.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Russia was mounting a sophisticated “disinformation campaign” aimed at undermining attempts to exploit alternative energy sources such as shale gas
Several people have been detained at an anti-monarchy protest near Madrid’s heavily guarded central square following the coronation of Felipe VI as Spain’s new king.
It seems the BBC are capable of tracking down a single Scot in Brazil who cheered a goal against England but fail to notice 50,000 demonstrating on their doorstep.
The city of Miami on Friday filed a lawsuit in a federal court against JPMorgan Chase & Co., accusing the banking giant of a pattern of discriminatory loan practices “since at least 2004″ which sparked foreclosures and violated the U.S. Fair Housing Act.
“JPMorgan has engaged in a continuous pattern and practice of mortgage discrimination in Miami since at least 2004 by imposing different terms or conditions on a discriminatory and legally prohibited basis,” Bloomberg reports lawyers for Miami as saying in the complaint.
Tens of thousands of people marched through central London on Saturday afternoon in protest at austerity measures introduced by the coalition government. The demonstrators gathered before the Houses of Parliament, where they were addressed by speakers, including comedians Russell Brand and Mark Steel.
A few months back the filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin got some bad news. The PBS funding that they had counted on to complete their documentary on campaign financing was being withdrawn. This setback came not long after PBS took the unusual step of warning David Koch (of right-wing billionaire donors “the Koch Brothers” fame) that he had been negatively portrayed in another of the networks documentaries, and giving them a chance to respond.
So why no mention of the suspect’s stated motive now? Fox News has aired more than 2,000 segments on the Benghazi attacks. Like other right-wing media with the Benghazi bug, Fox News claims that the White House deceived the public by not immediately branding the incident an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist attack, but instead claimed that it was a spontaneous reaction to the notorious internet video. The motive for the deception, goes the theory, was the White House’s desire not to remind voters that Al-Qaeda was still active two months before a US presidential elections (e.g., Special Report, 5/14/13.)
Indeed, the conspiracy-mongering got so out of control at one point that the Republicans, with Fox News at their backs, attempted to turn a State Department email mentioning that the anti-Muslim Internet video had caused incidents at a number of US embassies into a smoking gun–evidence, they said, that State Department was trying to repeat inaccurate talking points to be used on Sunday morning chat shows (e.g., Kelly File, 5/1/14). They were ultimately unsuccessful, as more level-headed media corrected the record (e.g., Slate, 4/30/14).
Apple co-founder, nerd legend, and all-round Good Guy Steve Wozniak has recorded an excellent video explaining why he’s supporting Larry Lessig’s Mayday.US super PAC, which is raising $5M to elect lawmakers who’ll promise to vote to abolish super PACs and effect major campaign finance reform.
This is what happened when a friend of Vox Political, going by the monicker Sick Britain, contacted the BBC to ask why there has been no coverage of today’s (June 21) anti-austerity demonstration in London, which was attended by more than 50,000 people.
The Bill of Rights and other provisions of our Constitution have been gone anyway, what with presidents starting wars all over the world without even a nod to Congress and the National Security Administration recording everything from whom we call to who calls us to our facial images. The spooks can find us whenever they want.
A new poll suggests Canadians are giving a thumbs down to the Conservative government’s cyberbullying legislation, at least when asked about elements of Bill C-13 that have nothing to do with cyberbullying.
The poll by Forum Research, conducted June 13-14 and surveying 1,433 Canadians via interactive voice response, showed more than two-thirds of Canadians disapproved of a stipulation in the controversial bill that would allow authorities to access personal data without a warrant.
Since then, the company says it has signed up 200,000 users – and it just launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo because, co-founder Andy Yen says, “that is the best way to get financing and also keep ProtonMail independent.”
That’s the monthly fee that former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander charges banks for advice. The four-star general, who once oversaw U.S. digital defenses, has joined a growing field of cyberconsultants, and the audience is receptive. Under pressure from regulators, lawmakers and their customers, financial services firms are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into protecting themselves from digital assaults.
Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the Fritz Bauer Prize of the German Humanist Union, a prominent civil rights organization, for exposing the controversial surveillance practices of the NSA and its accomplices.
Things got heated Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” after Glenn Greenwald called Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America founder Paul Rieckhoff’s questioning of Edward Snowden’s asylum in Russia “total bulls—-.”
After last year Germany’s Der Spiegel published a 48-page catalog of gadgets used by the NSA back in 2008, a group of hackers led by security researcher Dean Pierce decided to make an attempt to reconstruct these NSA spying gadgets using open-source hardware.
We’ve heard variations on the phrase “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the government for quite some time. It appears this may be true, at least if you are the government.
In the case of Stingray, a cell phone spying device used against Americans, the government does have something to hide and they fear the release of more information. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment weeps quietly in the corner.
Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.
General Motors wants to make it easier for Chinese customers to curse out the moron who cut them off or get the digits of the attractive driver one car over at the stop light. So it’s developed an app called DiDi Plate that lets Android users text the owner of a car by simply scanning its license plate.
Two Green Party politicians have criticised police chiefs who recorded their political activities on a secret database that tracks ‘domestic extremists’
As The Zhivago Affair reveals, Feltrinelli was not the novel’s only publisher: The CIA played a central role in promoting and disseminating Pasternak’s novel. “The CIA, as it happened, loved literature,” Finn and Couvee write, and the agency was involved in the shipment of some one million books behind the Iron Curtain, including Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nabokov’s Pnin. It became an urgent American agenda to place Doctor Zhivago in the hands of Russian readers. At a 1958 exposition in Brussels, attended by many Soviet visitors, the Vatican pavilion gave out free copies of Zhivago. In the words of a CIA memo, “this book has great propaganda value.”
Activist Margaretta D’Arcy made a strong presentation to an Oireachtas committee on the use of Irish airspace and Shannon Airport by, in particular, the US Military and CIA.
POLICE are investigating evidence that a CIA jet landed in Glasgow after carrying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to a secret torture prison in Poland.
And the Sunday Mail can reveal that elite detectives are also probing five other stopovers in Scotland, which researchers suspect were part of CIA “rendition circuits” to move terror suspects between secret jails and torture sites.
Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has called on the UK Government to restrict the use by the US of Diego Garcia, a British overseas territory, for renditions.
To make matters worse, agencies can’t deal with the explosion in electronic information. The CIA is believed to generate 1 petabyte of classified records every 18 months, or the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets of documents.
25-year-old Emma Czornobaj stopped her car on the left lane of a highway near Montreal in 2010 after spotting a group of stray ducklings on the road. A motorcyclist and his daughter were killed after slamming into her car.
Even if hackers like Mr. Swartz are still a problem for us to reconcile in real life, maybe it is in the movies, with their capacity to empathize with the outré, their ability to present difficult, morally prismatic antiheroes, that we can properly come to terms with them. Especially now, in a world so vividly shaped by complex agents of change like Mr. Assange and Edward J. Snowden, we may need movies to help us comprehend our shades of gray.
Many news articles have reported record deportations under Obama, while his anti-immigration critics have argued that a sensitivity to novelties in classification expose a president lax on border enforcement. Adjusting for all this, it appears that the truth is somewhere in the middle: Overall, the Obama administration has conducted deportation policies qualitatively similar to the last administration’s. Whether one concludes a slight decline or increase, the more important fact is that there has been no radical shift since he took office, and certainly not one toward liberalization. Obama’s proposal for reform last year was in fact quite reminiscent of Bush’s plan. Although conservatives tended to find Bush too liberal on immigration, a June 2007 poll showed that 45 percent of Republicans favored their president on these policies, down from 61 percent just a few months before.
Several people were injured by rubber bullets and teargas canisters in Tuesday’s dawn attack by police on a tent community occupying a historic wharf known as Cais José Estelita.
It seems as though we may never know how many elected politicians have been monitored by the police’s ‘domestic extremism’ unit.
And the reason? Police say that they have not counted how many there are.
In response to a freedom of information request from the Guardian, Scotland Yard said that the national ‘domestic extremism’ unit “has not conducted any research to count how many elected politicians are currently recorded in any way in its files.”
Clashes in São Paulo ongoing, activists erected barricades and police have begun trying to disperse them with gas bombs. Protestors trashed a high-class car dealership and a bank on their way to the barricades, the cops could not keep up.
At least 5 people were arrested by the Spanish police for displaying flags for the Republic during the crowning ceremony of an imposed king aimed to reboot the fading support for the monarchy.
Since 2008, it is legal to carry flags in support of the republic in Spain, but police arrested old people, young people, parents in front of their kids, intimidated and abused dozens for speaking against the king on the streets, or for wearing anti-monarchy signs. The ones who shouted ”¡Viva la República!” (Long live the Republic), during the ceremony, were arrested on the spot, officials said that it was for the crime of “opposing resistance to the authorities“.
Last year, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) accused California of sterilizing over 140 female inmates between 2006 and 2010 without required state approvals.
One doctor, James Heinrich, was responsible for the two-thirds of the tubal ligation referrals during that period from the biggest offender, Valley State prison.
Asked by CIR about his startling record, Heinrich justified the money spent sterilizing inmates by claiming it was minimal “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they procreated more.” He has since been barred from future prison work.
Conventional wisdom dictates that to maintain your security and privacy, you should encrypt your Wi-Fi network. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that partially opening up your home Wi-Fi network could actually enhance your privacy, and is working on a tool to make it easier to do so.
Since the text itself is pretty dry, WikiLeaks has asked one of the world’s top experts on these trade agreements, Professor Jane Kelsey of the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland, New Zealand, to provide a commentary. I strongly recommend reading her analysis, since it explains what all those innocuous-sounding phrases really mean. Here is her summary of what the new leak tells us…
After several years of development, Kim Dotcom’s much-anticipated music streaming platform Baboom is gearing up for its public release. Baboom aims to disrupt the music industry by closing the bridge between artists and fans. This includes a higher revenue share for artists and free music streaming in a lossless format for fans.
The EU Commission will next week announce new strategies for dealing with online piracy and counterfeiting. These non-legislative measures will include an EU action plan aimed at fighting IP infringement, plus a strategy to protect and enforce IP rights in third countries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the aim is to “follow the money”.
A new survey of young children and adults has found consensus on what should be charged for content online. In both groups, 49% said that people should be able to download content they want for free, with a quarter of 16-24 year olds stating that file-sharing was the only way they could afford to obtain it.
Posted in Patents at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Eisenhower warns us of the military industrial complex
Summary: Vested interests in the patents industry make the USPTO an inherent enemy of public interests
THE USPTO clearly got out of control. Watch this article and another one titled “Software patents – new USPTO pilot program to expedite examination”. This was reported shortly before the SCOTUS rules against the excess of software patents. The former head of the USPTO was a big proponent of software patents and it’s not surprising; the USPTO just seeks to increase its power by patenting everything under the Sun. After a coup by corporations like IBM (which put their mole there) it seems like there’s no going back to sanity unless the whole institution gets rebooted or de-funded/dismantled. The Obama Administration made things worse because almost no patent application gets rejected anymore. They pretend it’s indicative of greater innovation.
Patent offices lobbying for more power and wider scope of patents is not just a problem in the US, but like most things, it’s far bigger in the US and there is huge trans-Pacific/Atlantic lobbying trying to have every other system assimilated to US law. Watch what’s going on in India, which keeps fighting against crazy patent monopolies from the West. India has fought hard against software patents despite pressure from some Indian patent lawyers who of course wanted these. It was the same in New Zealand, where the lawyers are now whining that they don’t get much business. To quote a new article: “A review of the numbers of local patent filings made in New Zealand and who was making those applications revealed the rather startling statistic that a large proportion of local patent filings were not made through specialist IP firms, instead they appeared to be self filed.”
Wherever we go in the world there is a war waged by parasitic patent lawyers who try to tax innovation while promising to ban competition or tax the competition (they get commissions on it all). In the patent system itself there is a big desire to always patent more and more things (unlike in courts), so there too there is a conflict of interest and we must stop it. Eternal warfare is market stability to arms companies and maximal patenting/litigation is market stability to law firms. We should tackle both problems similarly and mercilessly. It’s not going to be easy. █
Summary: Apple continues to misuse patents as a tool of competitive advantage, relying in part on a biased US corporations-run system (USPTO and ITC) or courts (CAFC)
AS WE SHOWED earlier this month, the US patent office has been exceptionally friendly towards Apple, not the Korean giant, Samsung. The USPTO (and by extension ITC) is one of those pseudo-public institutions that are run by US corporations, not impartial actors. Those are are friendly towards Apple have financial reasons to be like that.
It was very recently reported that Apple patents ideas that relate to stuff which already exists from Samsung but not from Apple. Since the patent system checks what’s already filed rather than what exists in the world/market, this type of abuse is allowed. Apple is basically allowed to patent what the rivals have (and have not patented), then copy the rivals and block their products (e.g. ITC embargo on imports). Watch this ITC war that Apple started. It’s failing badly, but it is still unjust. “Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co.,” says this report, “on Friday agreed to drop their appeals of a patent-infringement case at the US International Trade Commission (ITC) that resulted in an import ban on some older model Samsung phones. Samsung has been seeking to overturn the ban, while Apple was trying to revive other patent claims it had lost. The import ban will remain in effect, according to a filing with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Last month both companies blamed each other for their inability to reach a global settlement. Appeals of district court cases between Apple and Samsung are still pending.”
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a corrupt sham. It should cease to have any impact on law and it is highly predicable (barely surprising) that it let Apple make all this mess. As one respectable site put it, Apple’s patent wars may in fact be “a Marketing Strategy”, pretending that Apple invented everything despite its founder’s admission that it copies a lot from other companies. To quote the analysis: “The latest battle in the three-year long Apple-Samsung patent saga concluded few weeks ago. In contrast to previous litigation between the two tech-giants—which revolved on the overall look of the phones—this case focused around autocomplete, tap-from-search and slide-to-unlock software. Despite the technical nature of these innovations, there are a few broad managerial lessons that have emerged from this prominent patent case.”
Further down it says: “The Apple-Samsung patent war illustrates how patent litigation has impacts that go far beyond stopping a specific firm from copying a particular technology. This narrow view overlooks the effect it has on brands, and on other competitors not named in the suits. In considering their own IP strategy and in responding to litigation, managers can benefit from thinking more broadly about patent wars and recognizing their multiple effects.”
Apple is a shameful embargo company that copies others, then tries to ban them. Apple relies on an inherently corrupt and biased legal system in the US. Those who have not yet chosen to boycott Apple should think about what Apple does to innovation and fair competition. Remember that all those devices that Apple fights against are based on Linux. █
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Patent lawyers fight to maintain artificial barriers
Summary: Systematic distraction or obfuscation of the SCOTUS ruling, which basically rendered a lot of software patents utterly useless in every court in the United States and abroad/at the border (ITC)
WE SAW THIS after the Bilski case. We saw it many times after that. Lawyers try to shape the truth based on their own preferences. That’s what they do for a living. We must counter them before they successfully change the nature of this whole debate.
Various articles that we see coming from patent lawyers (and patent-centric publications) are an absolute disgrace, but this is precisely what we predicted would happen. Revisionism as such typically becomes necessary when there’s a decision impacting their business. They turn their back on truth and start spinning, or lying by omission.
Remember that lawyers are good liars (or truth twisters), they are not necessarily judges, although judges too have their faults and occasional corruption. Their goal is not justice. They need to just lie on behalf of people (clients), or twist the facts not for the purpose of justice but for winning a case. That’s their occupation by definition and the SCOTUS decision is seen as a threat to some of them.
The corporate media’s coverage [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] was mostly OK (sticking to the facts rather than twisting them), but there’s already spin from patent lawyers, such as this article by James M. Singer from Fox Rothschild LLP. Its headline states “Supreme Court Delivers Blow To ‘Abstract’ Software Patents, While Stating That Software Still Can Be Patent-Eligible” (the latter part conveys bias).
Watch how Microsoft booster Richard Waters twists the facts, by going with the deceiving headline “Software patents survive US Supreme Court test”. This lousy journalist is a longtime Microsoft spinner (who told lies) and he has just told readers the very opposite of what happened. Richard Waters makes the Financial Times look no better than Fox ‘news’ (AP and CNN did get it right this time).
The SCOTUS decision would do more to help than all those so-called ‘reforms’ that achieve nothing serious, except perhaps the claim that something has been done (a distraction).
Another lawyer, Matt Levy , continues to divert attention to patent trolls. To quote his latest analysis: “Yesterday, the Supreme Court released its final patent opinion of the term, Alice v. CLS Bank. This case should help clarify the patent eligibility of software, and improve patent quality, but we’re still going to need patent reform legislation to really fix the problems in the patent system that are exploited by patent trolls.”
Nonsense. As many trolls use software patents, it is scope we should be striving to change. Some very large trolls like Microsoft would not be impeded by a reform that deals with small “trolls”. Patent Progress, the site of Levy, always focuses only on trolls; perhaps his goal is not to get rid of software patents but to merely change the landscape of litigation. Here he is speaking about trolls, including Intellectual Ventures, conveniently failing to mention the company behind it or that company’s record of racketeering with patents. “And earlier this week,” said this one post. “Matt Levy explained why the demand letter bills are insufficient to fix the patent troll problem.”
Matt Levy should be doing more to tackle software patents. The same goes for Steph from this trolls-focused site which asks: “You know what the biggest problem with patent trolls is? Oh sure, it’s that they cost companies buckets of money and stifle innovation by shutting down start ups. Those are bad, of course, but the real tragedy here is that they make people like Chris Hulls call someone a “piece of shit” and then look stupid in the process.”
The focus on trolls is the reason we stopped covering patent issues for nearly a year. Here we have an important decision regarding software patents, but people who claim to be pursuing “patent progress” carry on talking about trolls, as if they simply fail to see the broader issue and the ultimate solution to spurious litigation. █
Posted in Fraud, Microsoft at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Canada among the countries where Microsoft or its partners are caught bribing officials in exchange for pricey deals and lock-in
TECHRIGHTS has been writing a great deal about Quebec because Microsoft corruption seemed quite common there. Here aresomememorableexamples. The latest example was reported by a Microsoft site, which said: “Both face charges of fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud and breach of trust.”
The Public Security Ministry is involved, too. “No doubt they came bundled with M$’s favourite OS,” writes Pogson (Canadian blogger), “and an ubiquitous office suite… The contract was for $3.3million CAD and the kickback was $400K CAD. I wonder what M$’s share was. They must have had a ton of software on those computers to justify such a large kickback. Do you think the item would be covered by “promotion” or “cost of sales”?”
Microsoft bribing government officials is not news (even direct bribes). There are some ongoing investigations in numerous countries. Catching the involved people red-handed is important because Microsoft likes to deny charges based on uncertainty or settlements. █
Summary: A look at some of the latest privacy-washing of Microsoft (the worst privacy offender in the software world) and the parallel actions of Bill Gates and fellow plutocrats
Surveillance is a hot subject these days. People finally oppose mass surveillance because they know a lot better just how bad it is, owing for the most part to leaks.
Virtually no software company has been worse than Microsoft when it comes to surveillance, not even Google or Facebook, which is a monstrous surveillance machine that’s partly owned by Microsoft. We were rather disgusted to see the role that GigaOM, the network of Om Malik, played in providing Microsoft with a “propaganda platform” (to use a now-comical term from the US State Department). How much did Microsoft pay Malik in 2006 (or thereabouts) when he embedded Microsoft propaganda inside his articles (Microsoft still does such things)? Nobody knows how much, but there were payments involved. This criminal company, Microsoft, paid for AstroTurfing of this kind and now it pushes the preposterous idea of opening ‘transparency centres’, owing to Malik’s hosting. Microsoft admits it is hurt by the public’s understanding that it’s in bed with the NSA [1], so it lies to the public using Malik’s platform. Here is more of that, also from HP.
The situation has gotten so serious that even British banks are now worried about Fog Computing [2], especially if it involves NSA/PRISM companies like Microsoft (the #1 company in PRISM).
Speaking of surveillance, Bill Gates, who is a famous proponent of the NSA, uses taxpayers-funded Establishments, such as schools and public media (e.g. PBS and NPR), for surveillance. These are common targets for Bill Gates bribes. It’s a perception game. You bribe the right people to get the agenda rectified. He also invests in surveillance companies such as G4SandInBloom (along with Rupert Murdoch). The other day we found this good article on this topic, titled “PARCC Security Breaches Revealed; Microsoft, InBloom, News Corp. Implicated”.
The article says: “When LouisianaVoice broke the story about the stealth agreement between the Louisiana Department of Education (DOE) and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. whereby DOE would provide News Corp. with personal information on Louisiana’s public school students for use by a company affiliated with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the resulting firestorm resulted in cancellation of the agreement.
“Or did it?
“Remember, too, that it was Murdoch who, in 2010, speaking of the enormous business opportunity in public education awaiting corporate America, said, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S.”
“In June of 2012, Erin Bendily, assistant deputy superintendent for departmental support and former education policy adviser to Gov. Bobby Jindal emailed Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White:
““I think we need to start with a very strong introduction and embed more CCSS (Common Core State Standards) alignment/integration throughout. This sounds harsh, but we should show that our current/old educator evaluation system is crap and the new system is stellar.””
We covered Common Core before. It’s all about turning schools into indoctrination centres (of the rich) and Professor Diane Ravitch, a vocal opponent of Gates (who calls for Federal action against him), has this new article about “Making Schools Poor” (so that they can be bought out). To quote: “It pretends that great teachers will magically appear after principals gain the power to fire teachers without the necessity of hearings. But inner-city schools already have high teacher turnover and difficulty attracting well-qualified teachers. What’s needed most in schools that serve the poorest children is adequate resources, a full curriculum, and a stable, experienced staff. The Vergara decision will do nothing to improve working conditions, to attract better qualified teachers, or to increase the resources available to the neediest children.”
The talking point which belittles teachers and accuses them of being inadequate has been famously pushed forth by Gates, who seeks to replace teachers with surveillance gadgets (bracelets) and centralised surveillance systems to monitor (profile) both teachers and students. No doubt Gates is a big champion of surveillance and everyone should make no mistake about Microsoft’s privacy policy (note Gates’ current role in the company’s strategy). Microsoft would even read people’s personal E-mails to get them jailed and deported (nothing to do with national security or even three-letter agencies). █
Summary: Amid tightening relationships and collaborations between China and Russia, two common targets of espionage attacks by the West, more moves are seen which rid themselves of Microsoft
WE HAVE been patiently watching and accumulating reports about China’s hostile treatment of Microsoft, including — quite notably — the ban on Windows, which is a serious security risk that should be avoided not only for security reasons (back doors and much more). China is boldly moving to domestically-developed operating systems, based on GNU and Linux (so that China can properly study the source code). Over the past few days there were many articles about China’s attempt to de-fang Microsoft’s blackmail monster, essentially by making a ‘namedrop’ of all the patents involved. This will prove exceptionally helpful to the FOSS community, for reasons we shall explain later.
In our daily links (posted just an hour ago) we included an important link from Phoronix. It indicates that Russia is now dodging x86, probably ensuring that no system will be able to run Microsoft Windows or even proprietary programs for Microsoft Windows. This is potentially huge and perhaps there will be a lot of media coverage on Monday.
Both China and Russia have solid, defensible reasons for abandoning Microsoft Windows. This operating system has been used for political and economic espionage that requires illegal (hence secret, even at the court level) surveillance. Microsoft is the NSA’s software-centric best friend (in telecommunications the NSA has many more good friends) and in another post (tomorrow) we shall say more about it.
So, what exactly has China just done?
Years ago we wrote about what Microsoft had done in China. It’s a sort of political corruption, boosted in part by Bill Gates’ lobbying.
Well, China seems to have had enough of that nonsense and it won’t tolerate Microsoft’s blackmail, either. As The Mukt put it, the “Chinese government exposes Microsoft’s secret patents used against Android” as “Microsoft is one such company which has been trying to abuse the flawed US patent system to extort money from those companies with use GNU/Linux based systems including Android and Chrome OS.”
Here is a report from an Android-hostile site which uses the term “Android patents” (similar to FOSSPatents, which is an absurd FUD term) rather than “patents used against Android” (as put in other sites).
We wish to remind readers that Huawei, now known as a target of the NSA (the NSA attacked Huawei’s network and infiltrated it), was reportedly (since 2012 or thereabouts) pursued by Microsoft for an Android patent extortion deal — one that Microsoft never got. Given the close relationship between Huawei and the Chinese government (in the West too the government is closely tied with telecommunications companies) one has to wonder if Huawei was the source of this new disclosure. Unlike ZTE, Huawei never surrendered to Microsoft’s extortion and blackmail (most likely violations of the RICO Act in the United States). With evidence out there, might there finally be federal action against Microsoft? It might help China’s Huawei and the other giant, ZTE, so it’s easy to see China’s interests here. But it’s not just about China. Many companies in east Asia, west Europe, and even the United States are also victims of Microsoft’s bullying. Many articles correctly pointed out the similarity here to the Barnes and Noble saga, where Microsoft ended up bribing Barnes and Noble to drop the case and almost drop Android/Linux, as well [1, 2, 3, 4].
Well, they prove that the Microsoft method of bullying and insinuation works. But despite that, they didn’t prove that Android infringed on Microsoft’s patents because – as usual – the latter refused to reveal what exactly they were. That’s because their power really lay in their vagueness. While companies were unsure which patents Microsoft was talking about, it was more or less impossible for them to check whether they were affected. That meant they would probably be open to an easy deal with Microsoft – better to pay up than have a patent sword of Damocles hanging over you.
And that, until recently, was pretty much the state of play. Many Android manufacturers decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and signed licensing agreements with Microsoft – all secret, and therefore all maintaining the vagueness and the power to threaten. But something dramatic has just happened: in order for Microsoft to gain approval from the Chinese Ministry of Communications (MOFCOM) for the company’s purchase of Nokia, Microsoft was obliged to provide lists of the patents it claims are infringed upon by Android. That’s presumably because so many smartphones made in China use Android or a variant of it, that the authorities there were concerned Microsoft might be able to threaten its local companies.
A Chinese government website has published lists of the patents that Microsoft claims are necessary to the functioning of Android smartphones, the first time such lists have been made public.
The patents were analysed by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) as part of its review of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s handset business, which China approved in April.
Pogson correctly points out: “Thanks to inquiries in China, a list is now public. This will permit M$’s competitors to organize a cooperative response rather than suffering under “divide and conquer” conditions.”
China is moving away from Windows rather than pay Microsoft to be spied on by espionage champions like the NSA. Will Hill says: “I’m not sure if Ars is recycling really old fud against gnu/linux or if people in China are going to cut all the FAT out of Android to avoid Microsoft bullshit.”
What Barnes and Noble tried to do before selling out might actually resume with China’s strong lead. This may include resistance to Nokia (e.g. opposition to takeover), which Microsoft plans to use as a patent proxy and a source of patent-stacking (through trolls like MOSAID).
Special credit must go to Joe Mullin. The earliest report we found about this latest development came from him and stated: “For more than three years now, Microsoft has held to the line that it has loads of patents that are infringed by Google’s Android operating system. “Licensing is the solution,” wrote the company’s head IP honcho in 2011, explaining Microsoft’s decision to sue Barnes & Noble’s Android-powered Nook reader.
“Microsoft has revealed a few of those patents since as it has unleashed litigation against Android device makers. But for the most part, they’ve remained secret. That’s led to a kind of parlor game where industry observers have speculated about what patents Microsoft might be holding over Android.
“That long guessing game is now over. A list of hundreds of patents that Microsoft believes entitle it to royalties over Android phones, and perhaps smartphones in general, has been published on a Chinese language website.
“The patents Microsoft plans to wield against Android describe a range of technologies. They include lots of technologies developed at Microsoft, as well as patents that Microsoft acquired by participating in the Rockstar Consortium, which spent $4.5 billion on patents that were auctioned off after the Nortel bankruptcy.
“The list of patents was apparently produced as part of a Chinese government antitrust review relating to Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia. Microsoft described the results of that review in an April 8 blog post, writing that the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) “concluded after its investigation that Microsoft holds approximately 200 patent families that are necessary to build an Android smartphone.”
FOSS guru Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols correctly points out that “[n]ow that the Chinese government has revealed the patents within Microsoft’s Android patent portfolio, Microsoft may soon be facing challenges from vendors over its Android patent licensing agreements.”
China may have derailed Microsoft’s extortion by removing the NDA barrier (the same trick Microsoft used when dividing OEMs to conquer the industry). Android will definitely benefit from it and so will derivatives of Android, including China’s. Vaughan-Nichols has an explanation worth reading.
We should probably stress that not all derivatives of Android are safe to use. Nokia turns Android into a Microsoft surveillance platform and the CIA’s top partner, Amazon, has reportedly taken surveillance in Fire (Android-based but altered) to new and rather scary levels [1,2]. We don’t know yet if China will do the same, but reports from years ago said that China had put back doors in its own official distribution of GNU/Linux. This was quite likely correct. █
Amazon is a fascinating company, and the Amazon Fire Phone is a fascinating machine for connecting you with stuff to buy. It’s probably also the biggest single invasion of your privacy for commercial purposes ever.
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