09.14.10
Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Office Suites at 6:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Child rape case cannot have a verdict served because of Microsoft Word problems, which “Microsoft specialists” are called to help with
FOR SOMEONE to profit from one’s own shoddy creation is rather unjust, but that’s just what Microsoft attained and accomplished by making money from problems it created/enabled, such as Conficker. Vista 7 is currently being discussed in the context of insecurity… in fact, because of a worm called seven.exe:
Last week, as usual, my USB drive got infected from a public computer. What is interesting here is that this was a Windows 7 system. Coincidentally, the malware that jumped to my USB drive was called seven.exe so I checked online to see what it does, partly in jealousy because Megatotoro reported that he got his first beacon.
It turns out that seven.exe is a worm that has been around since 2007 (hence the name) and, consequently, predates Windows 7, which was released in 2009.
In Windows, USB drives usually self-execute files. What a terrible design decision from Microsoft. No wonder if makes so much money selling services and “security” addons; its operating system is built almost to just require that. It is too tolerant to malware.
According to this summary/translation from Slashdot, a high-profile case is hindered by Microsoft incompetence and Microsoft “specialists” are then being invoked to make some money:
The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained ‘computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.’ (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the ‘text formatting glitch,’ while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict.
The two issues are, first of all, the mistake of using Office in such an important scenario; the second is the hiring of Microsoft folks to resolve the problems which Microsoft is probably responsible for (it created files that hide personal data and disrespect the user and that’s a subject for another day). █
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Posted in America, Law, Patents at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Drivers of the counter-productive patent law in the United States are named; why the patent system in the US is also a curse to hardware/software companies in other countries
IT IS no secret that Biden in particular (more so than Obama) turned the US government into a servant of its friends over at Hollywood. To a lesser degree, more or less the same can be said about Microsoft, at least as far as software policy is concerned.
Jamie Love has only just revealed “Obama administration funding of pro-right holder NGO work on IPR protection”:
USPTO’s $4 million of Congressionally Mandated Spending on intellectual property initiatives, for fy 2009
This is the USPTO list of grants for fy 2009. The $4 million in grants were used to influence global norms on IPR policy.
A new round of grants will go out soon for fy 2010, involving another $4 million of Congressionally Mandated Spending on Intellectual Property Initiatives (IPI).
Michael Geist of ACTA fame says:
This is really shocking. Obama administration funding of pro-right holder NGO work on IPR. http://bit.ly/bHjU4H
The FFII says:
Shocking! Obama administration funds the tobacco patent lobby http://www.keionline.org/node/941
The word “tobacco” refers to the familiar methods being used to deny the undeniable and protect harmful businesses/business models that destroy society. One example of insane laws that make no economic sense and do more harm than good would be software patents.
American policy regarding software patents was recently defended by Martin Goetz, allegedly the holder of the first software patent. We do not understand whether the publisher or Goetz himself had second thoughts about it as they deleted the post, but Wayne has a copy and a very long rebuttal to Goetz. It ends as follows:
What he’s saying is, See? I’m a nice guy. I oppose the Amazon one-click patent. Yeah, right.
Like most Americans, Martin is rather uneducated. Seriously. Americans really don’t know the history of their country. Oh, they can often rattle off the names and dates of battles, but they miss more important things.
Why did the Thirteen Colonies rebel against the British Empire? Most people will say that freedom is involved, but when you push, you quickly find out that they don’t know how.
The Thirteen Colonies rebelled against the English for economic reasons. The Empire was set up as a supplier of raw materials for English factories. Raw materials were shipped to England, and manufactured goods were shipped back. To keep this profitable setup in operation, it was necessary to pass legislation limiting the ability of the colonies to set up their own manufacturing plants.
A group of rich inhabitants of part of North America, including the very wealthy George Washington, didn’t like this. They wanted to set up their own factories in North America, so they could grab a slice of the huge market themselves. Factories in North America would have dramatically lower shipping costs than factories in England, which would be a huge advantage. The English merchants of course were opposed to this, as it would cost them money.
It ended up costing them money anyway, when the Colonies actually managed a successful rebellion against the Crown. Did you ever notice how many of the Founding Fathers were be-wigged aristocrats? Now you know why. The Founding Fathers were in it for the money, honey.
Interestingly enough, Goetz’s piece has just been reposted (after it was taken down). The date on it is the 14th right now (it was found just minutes before posting this). As Jay Shaw very recently explained, the United States shoots its own foot by permitting software to be patented (more of the same here):
“We still believe the case had no merit and that had we fought it we’d have had a very good chance of winning, but it was made very clear to us that the software patent system in the U.S. can drag on for years in the courts and when you add in lots of fees for lawyers and other legal expenses we thought the sensible thing to do was settle,” Chief Executive Jay Shaw said.
Google’s Android (Linux) has just been hit by another patent lawsuit, this time over location-based services. The short blog post from Forbes mentions other actions and names software patents:
The other reason for Google’s silence may be that the company is regularly presented with patent claims related to Android. Many of the claimants, such as the Illinois man who said he had trademarked the term Android back in 2002, appear to be angling for a quick payout. Others, such as Apple, which alleges that several Android phones made by Taiwan’s HTC step on its hardware and software patents, and Oracle, which says Android infringes on patents related to its Java technology, are more daunting challengers–and may be monopolizing the time of Google’s lawyers.
HTC is not based in the US, so once again it helps show that US law matters to other countries too. This is why all nations, not just the United States, mind the indefensible opinions of people like Goetz and outrageous funding from the Obama administration (i.e. taxpayers), which goes towards empowering software patents, i.e. hurt those very same taxpayers. Awareness is not sufficient among the general public (still a niche debate), so these crooked acts may carry on for a while. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As someone without a technical background, I’m often skeptical of promises like “one-button setup” and “installs in 2 minutes.” Just because it’s easy or obvious for the developer, doesn’t mean it’s easy for the end-user. “Turnkey” isn’t always “turnkey.”
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He’s been listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time, and was a 2008 inductee to the Computer History Museum.
In 2004, he was called one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In 2000, he ranked #17 in Time’s Person of the Century Poll.
That same year he was awarded an honorary dotor status at the University of Helsinki, a Lovelace Medal and an Award for Industry Achievement by Infoworld.
But back in 1998, Linus Torvalds was a man with a manifesto and he sat down with boot to discuss the future of open source software and Linux.
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When it all boils down, does Linux on the desktop really matter? Last week, I touched on the problems counting the number of Linux desktops, but the real question is does it really matter?
Over the weekend I made my annual pilgrimage to Columbus, Ohio for the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF). While I’m skeptical that the Linux desktop has more than 5% of the market (all desktops in use) in the general population, the Linux desktop had about 95% of the OLF-attending population. Yet at least two of the talks, including Stormy Peters’ keynote, asked the question “does the Linux desktop even matter?”
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Server
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Learning to administer a new operating system is intimidating. We are expected to combine home experimentation, job experience and vendor certifications to get any real understanding of how operating systems, applications and devices work. With a few exceptions, education programs provide little more than a cursory overview of operating system admin. Major strains of Linux place files in different locations, use different configurations for fundamental tools and are based on different package managers. Many of the skills learned in one major strain will port to another; but coming to grips with the differences is not easy.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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The Samba developers have released version 3.5.5 of Samba, a security update that addresses a buffer overrun vulnerability in their open source file and print server software. According to the developers, the vulnerability affects the sid_parse() function and the related dom_sid_parse() function which do not correctly check their input lengths when reading binary versions of a Windows Security ID (SID); a file share connection – authenticated or unauthenticated – is needed to exploit the issue.
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Final conclusion: if you like XMMS and use KDE, then Qmmp can be a perfect choice. On the other hand, for those used with collection-oriented players like Amarok will probably not like this player.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Red Hat Family
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Piper analyst says, ” Shares have appreciated 394% in the past 22 months, versus 49% for the S&P 500, and we believe they are now fairly valued…We remain optimistic on near-term trends and believe the company is well-positioned for continued growth…However, our sector-wide analysis indicates growth rates for the current cycle are peaking in 2H:10, and as such, deceleration is likely to develop in the subsequent 3 to 6 months.”
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Fedora
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That’s still true of the b43 firmware for older (pre-802.11n) devices, but the firmware to go with their new driver is now in linux-firmware.git.
Their *original* offering of that new firmware had a stupid licence — you could only distribute it if you promised to indemnify and defend Broadcom from all related third-party lawsuits. They fixed that though, and I merged it.
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Debian Family
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Of all those topics, one topic *might* have consensus already: accepting as DDs contributors which have contributed a lot to Debian doing non-packaging work, which intend to continue doing so, and which are ready to uphold our Foundation Documents. My feeling of consensus on that builds upon: in person feedback, private mails, and a growing number of requests on that direction hitting Front Desk (which FD has kindly shared with me). I do have an impression of consensus, but I don’t have any “quantitative” evidence.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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During a small exploration we did internally few months ago, we thought about how Ubuntu could behave if it was more aware of its physical context. Not only detecting the tilt of the device (like iPhone apps) but also analysing the user’s presence.
This wasn’t really a new concept for me, in 2006 I experimented with a user proximity sensitive billboard idea. I reckon there is a value on adapting the content of the screen based on the distance with who is watching it.
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I’m pretty new as a Canonical employee overall, only having been with the company for about 7 months, but I must say I’m really thrilled to be part of a large gang of people so involved in making Ubuntu great; with so much pride in all the work accomplished. If there’s one thing that has been constantly motivating me, it has to be the prospect of working every day with the community and with other Canonical employees on making Ubuntu better.
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After the rather luke-warm reception that greeted the first ‘default wallpaper’ for Ubuntu 10.10 (through no fault of the Design team, more on that here) the latest iteration – and a much more pleasing one at that – has been revealed.
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In This Issue
* How Ubuntu is Made
* Daily Dose of Scribus Trunk
* Edubuntu Gets a New Installer
* Magic Trackpad Drivers Land in Ubuntu Maverick and Upstream!
* Making Usability Part of the Development Process
* Ubuntu Stats
* Free Banner for Approved LoCo Teams
* OLF Day 1: Ubucon
* Recent posts from Planet Launchpad
* Measuring the Value of Canonical’s Launchpad
* Cleansweep Updates
* GTK Impression – Nautilus Breadcrumbs
* New in Quickly for Maverick
* Ohio Linuxfest 2010
* Ruby packaging in Debian and Ubuntu: Mythbusting and FAQ
* Running Ubuntu on an Amazon “micro” Instance
* Some progress on Daily Builds
* This week in design – 10 September 2010
* In The Press
* In The Blogosphere
* Canonical’s Attention to Detail Starting To Show Up Big Time
* Fluendo DVD Player For Sale in Ubuntu 10.10
* Linaro Beta Released !
* OMG! Ubuntu! interviews GNOME co-founder, Frederico Mena
* TurnKey unveils a new kind of smart backup/restore system, powered by Amazon S3
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security
* Sneak Peek
* And Much Much More
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Flavours and Variants
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While Kubuntu received some polish this time, the latest version of KDE that powers it (version 4.5.1) might actually work against it. During my testing of KDE 4.5, I found it to have severe graphics problems with certain video cards (this laptop’s Intel card being one of them). The problems I had with KDE 4.5 include window thumbnails being so bright they cannot even be read, slow repainting of the panel (over ten seconds), distortion within transparent objects, and a complete plasma lock up when changing some settings under System Settings. Unfortunately, Kubuntu inherited all of those problems by adopting KDE 4.5, though thankfully the Kubuntu developers somehow fixed the thumbnail issue. I’m hoping that Kubuntu includes the upcoming KDE 4.5.2 release (which might fix these issues) but considering the timeframe for release, I doubt it will. Another downside is that the Plymouth splash screen (which is showed during boot) still doesn’t show anything other than a blinking cursor for me. I hope this gets fixed before release.
Although Kubuntu 10.10 isn’t out until next month, it’s already a very stable release from what I’ve seen so far. The only problems that Kubuntu has are those caused by using KDE 4.5, and as a result you may experience glitches in graphics, unless KDE 4.5.2 is included or the developers include some of their own tweaks. Other than that, it appears that Kubuntu may finally be on the right track! I’m excited to see how this release turns out come October 10th.
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Apple’s drastically updated Apple TV won’t ship until late this month. But home viewers looking for simple ways to enjoy Internet video and audio on their HDTVs will get a few other new options soon afterward — or in one case, maybe before Apple TV’s retail rebirth.
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I’m constantly amused (and always slightly disappointed) when an Open Source proponent is dismissive of Free Software, or even worse, hostile towards Free Software. Team Apologista may harbor and encourage the worst of the group, but they are not the only ones.
Just a methodology
Consider this: if you think Open Source is “just a development methodology” and Free Software is “too idealistic”, it seems quite absurd to get all excited and promotional about Open Source.
I mean I know some bass players that get a bit preachy about how playing with a pick (instead of fingers) is a terrible affront, but:
1. No one is really that serious about it
2. Who cares what bass players think anyway?
If something is just a methodology or technique — even a far superior one — what is there to get so all fired-up about?
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Open-Xchange, provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced today an exclusive distribution agreement with Next IT for hosted and on-premises Open-Xchange products in Japan.
Next IT will expand its portfolio with Open-Xchange by offering customers either: Open-Xchange Hosting Edition to web-hosting companies, ISPs, telecommunication companies and IT service companies; or an on-premises version to be installed and run on the enterprises’, educational institutions’ and government authorities’ own computers.
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Bloglines includes an API that could be extended to provide these services. Even if the main interface, the thick reader part of Bloglines was not used, the API could be installed anywhere, on any server, like WordPress. That is, of course, assuming that Bloglines was written with open source tools, as most modern web services are. Ask.com has made a big decision to shut down Bloglines after all these years, but with that decision comes an opportunity to ensure that the code they worked so hard on remains relevant, useful, and popular. Ask.com should release the code to Bloglines as open source.
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Blender is a free open source 3D modelling and graphics software widely used for making animated movies. Here is a nice collection of 8 short films and animations made using Blender which I think will give you an idea on Blender’s capabilities. Enjoy the ride.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 Beta 6 will reportedly address a number of issues found in previous development releases, including a critical stability issue on Windows systems. Beltzner notes that a problem related to plugins on Mac OS X that caused rendering and keyboard/mouse focus issues, that left key presses ignored or overlaid grey panels that obscured web pages, has been corrected. Beta 7 will be considered to be the “feature freeze milestone” and is tentatively planned for the “2nd half of September”.
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Firefox will still download updates automatically as it does now, and offer to install them prior to launching the browser. A silent method would have been nice, since it remove the possibility of a user simply clicking cancel or deny and running an out-of-date version. That system has certainly worked well for Chrome, though Chrome does have one advantage over Firefox when it comes to being “silent.”
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Databases
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Government
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With only hours notice the Department of Health called a press conference at its HQ in Whitehall. It said there was to be “an announcement on the future of the National Programme for IT”.
At about the same time a ministerial statement was laid in Parliament; and by lunchtime the media was reporting the death of the NPfIT. The Department’s press release said a review of the National Programme for IT had “concluded that a centralised national approach was no longer required”.
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Openness/Sharing
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I’ve also long embraced the principle that motivates OAuth. You should never have to give your name/password credentials to a third-party application or service so that it can impersonate you. This so-called password anti-pattern is profoundly wrong. When legitimate applications and services ask for permission to impersonate us, we learn that it’s OK to do things that way. It isn’t. Malicious actors can and do exploit our willingness to give up our credentials.
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A new British study of lads (and lasses?) who play shooting video games suggests that all that virtual spatial-navigation improves ability in driving, multitasking, and “reading the small print.” Sure you’re a dehumanized, sociopathic monster, but you drive so well!
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The naive enthusiasm of an American marketing graduate, hyped by the world media, may have risked the lives of Iranian activists through over-reaching claims for an inadequately understood software system
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Humanizing the need generated roughly twice the amount of money as the case made with statistics (which I suppose explains those Sally Struthers commercials on late night cable TV).
But the study didn’t stop there.
It created a hybrid pitch that centered on Rokia but also included facts and figures.
Now, what do you suppose happened to the donations?
As you can see in the chart below. combining factual information with the child’s story actually lowered the donations compared to the money that came in from pure storytelling.
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Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said he’ll never return to Japan after officials at an airport barred him from taking Ninja throwing stars aboard his private plane, SPA! magazine reported in its latest issue.
A security scan at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, detected the weapons inside the executive’s carry-on luggage in July as he was returning home to the U.S. from a family vacation in Kyoto, the Japanese magazine reported, citing unidentified officials at the airport and the transportation ministry.
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World leaders will be meeting at the UN in New York later this month to review progress towards the UN millennium development goals (MDGs) and to chart a course for accelerated action between now and 2015. Today, with just five years to go, there are fears that the goals may not be achieved, due to a lack of will by governments to acknowledge the role of other stakeholders and to work in partnership with them.
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Science
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EU researchers will have sustainable and continuous access to the combined processing power of over 200,000 desktop computers in more than 30 European countries thanks to the European Commission funded European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) project launched today. The Commission is contributing €25 million over four years to the EGI-InSPIRE project to link the processing capacity of desktop computers when they would otherwise be idle and so give researchers the processing power needed to tackle complex problems in environment, energy or health. The EGI, the largest collaborative production grid infrastructure for e-Science ever created, will enable teams of researchers in different geographical locations to work on a problem as if they were in the same laboratory
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Newton sought a deeper understanding of gravity in the concept of an Aetherial Medium with faster than light waves as illustrated in the quote from Opticks above. So too, the explanation for quantum mechanics may lie in some sort of faster than light waves that transmit signals between entangled particles. Another possibility is a “hyperspace” that connects all points in space-time together, bypassing normal space-time. Even more exotic possibilities may exist. Mathematically speaking, one is looking for a deeper, more fundamental equation or equations from which Schrödinger’s Equation can be derived.
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The next time you feel like your computer is struggling to keep up with your workload, spare a thought for the physicists at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC).
The researchers at the institute, based at Durham University, are tasking their machines with nothing less than recreating how galaxies are born and evolve over the course of billions of years.
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Health/Nutrition
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Just about a month ago, the disease-geek world was riveted by news of the “Indian superbug“: common bacteria carrying a newly recognized gene that confers profound multi-drug resistance, and that was linked to travel between Europe and South Asia, especially for medical tourism.
The gene, which directs production of an enzyme called NDM-1 for short, was briefly Bug of the Week, the spur for alarmist headlines in every Internet echo chamber and the target of denunciations by Indian politicians, who vilified the discovery as a Western “pharma conspiracy” spurred by envy of lucrative medical tourism.
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Security/Aggression
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This is an amazing and scary story: Kimberly Shields, a 23-year-old-manicurist, was mistaken for the woman who stole her identity, locked up in jail, strip-searched, and deloused before the bureaucratic mixup was resolved and she was set free.
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It’s good to see the White House begin to acknowledge the seriousness of the drug gang violence in Mexico — especially in the cities and towns that border the United States — and which some observers consider a national security threat. But as long as our government officials fail to adopt, strengthen, and enforce laws that could help protect brave men like Edelmiro Cavasos, along with countless everyday Americans, the risks increase for all of us.
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Despite being a party to international aviation and human rights treaties guaranteeing free passage through international airspace, the US government claims the right to require prior government permission (granted or withheld in secret, without due process, judicial review, or publicly disclosed standards) not just for travel to or from the USA but for transit through US airspace — even on nonstop flights that aren’t scheduled to land in US territory.
Most such overflights of the US between other countries are to and from Canada, where US control and surveillance of overflights have provoked continuing controversy and opposition.
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In his decision, Judge Raymond Fisher described the case as “a painful conflict between human rights and national security”. In the UK, we have seen some politicians conflate “national security” with “national embarrassment” – seeking to keep information secret not because its disclosure would create a risk to the nation, but rather because states do not want the details of their illegal activities revealed. Thankfully, British courts have proved relatively effective at policing this.
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New York City woke up yesterday to a 9/11 anniversary like no other. Blue skies hummed with the buzz of helicopters as police conducted a major operation to patrol two rival midday protests about Park51, the planned Islamic centre close to Ground Zero. The noise of the aircraft mingled with the sound of church bells ringing across Manhattan, marking the exact time that the first plane struck the World Trade Centre.
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Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters. They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa’idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.
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Barack Obama is to go ahead with plans to sell Saudi Arabia advanced aircraft and other weapons worth up to $60bn (£39bn), the biggest arms deal in US history, in a strategy of shoring up Gulf Arab allies to face any military threat from Iran.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the administration is also in talks with the Saudis about possible naval and missile-defence upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more over five to 10 years.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A comprehensive Wonk Room survey of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate finds that nearly all dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight global warming pollution. In May, 2010, the National Academies of Science reported to Congress that “the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change” because global warming is “caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.”
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WHEN 23 people drowned picking cockles on Morecambe bay, UK, in February 2004, it gave us a grim insight into the murky and frightening world of people trafficking.
The cockle pickers had been smuggled into the UK from the Fujian province in China by transnational criminal networks and used as cheap labour to extract lucrative shellfish from the sands. They were working at night in dangerous conditions, paid just £5 per sack of cockles while their gangmaster Lin Liang Ren received three times as much from the seafood companies at the shoreline. The people who died had hoped that two or three years working in the UK would provide a better life for their families back home. How wrong they were. The case shocked the world.
As well as highlighting the practice of people trafficking, the tragedy also revealed some stark realities about the international wildlife trade – how it is driven by wealth not poverty, and how it is inextricably linked with organised crime.
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Environmental campaigners focus on more modest goals as hopes of US climate legislation dwindle ahead of expected Republican gains
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The natural gas industry is coming under intense scrutiny today, after a massive fireball ripped through a ruptured pipeline in a suburban town near San Francisco, killing at least four people, injuring dozens more, and burning more than 50 homes to the ground.
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Researchers from the US Geological Survey (USGS), who have been tracking walrus movements using satellite radio tags, say 10,000 to 20,000 of the animals, mainly mothers and calves, are now congregating in tightly packed herds on the Alaskan side of the Chukchi Sea, in the first such exodus of its kind.
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Finance
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Like an emotionally distant lover, the less Goldman Sachs gives us, the more we want. In today’s New York Times, a Goldman spokesman declined to comment on the process by which the firm annually selects its partners, leading the Times to describe the process as “secretive” and driving us wild with curiosity. What kinds of sick things do they make potential partners do, for the firm to decline to speak about it entirely? What secrets lurk in the hearts of the hordes streaming in and out of the building on West Street? We asked a former Goldman Sachs partner to describe how this mysterious ritual works.
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The bulk of the media often gets pulled along for the ride when the United States government has a serious political and public relations campaign around foreign policy. But almost nowhere is it so monolithic as with Venezuela. Even in the runup to the Iraq war, there were a significant number of reporters and editorial writers who didn’t buy the official story. But on Venezuel, the media is more like a jury that has 12 people but only one brain.
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The International Monetary Fund undermined the main thrust of the UK coalition’s economic strategy today after it warned western governments that they risked holding back the recovery and creating a massive pool of disaffected labour if they pursued draconian cuts in spending.
IMF director general, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, told a conference in Oslo that governments needed to identify ways to generate employment to prevent a generation of workers losing their skills and joining the long-term unemployed. He said cuts in public spending had a “human cost” and could result in “tragedy” for millions of young people.
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This week it is two years since the US bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, setting off a wave of panic that almost brought down the entire financial sector. It is a truism that the two most important forces in the world of money are greed and fear. For years, during the boom, greed had dominated; now, in the aftermath of the Lehman implosion, fear kicked in, and the world’s banks stopped lending to each other, and to us. The result was the banking crisis, which in turn triggered the recession, which in turn triggered the collapse in the public finances that is going to be the dominant issue in this country for years.
Given what a big deal the collapse of Lehman turned out to be, you would think that it makes sense for there to be a whole fat book of legislation on the statue books designed to prevent a repetition of the crisis by making banks smaller and safer and more focused on their wider public function. Well, you might have thought that; but if you had, you would have been wrong, because there have been exactly no new laws targeting the causes of the crash. The systemic risks are the same as they were two years ago.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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The treatment of WikiLeaks’ spokesperson Julian Assange, facing investigations of harassment and rape, has been disgraceful, leading international human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has said from London, and the Australian government should make a formal protest to the Swedish ambassador on behalf of Assange, an Australian citizen.
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Bradley Manning faces a court martial for allegedly releasing military documents and videos that expose what appears to be a military policy of shooting unarmed civilians in cold blood.
It should be noted that the documents in question are nearly three years old and have little value except to historians and people who don’t want the truth to be known.
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The CBC is considering a new policy whereby people commenting on news stories must use their real names, a corporation spokesman has said in response to complaints from an MP.
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In the land of all-night samba clubs and soccer fanatics, Brazil is throwing its famously high-energy spirit into the untested waters of online democracy. Multimillion dollar budgets are being handed over to online “town halls,” and the federal government is crowdsourcing legislative consulting through interactive web tools.
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Tens of thousands of supporters added their names to the ACLU’s Protect Our Privacy Petition—calling on Congress to update and strengthen the decades-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Reading a physical book, giving it to a friend or selling it to a secondhand bookseller doesn’t involve any copyright-restricted acts, so the copyright owner has no control over those acts. An eBook is entirely different: even reading it involves copying, and copying (generally) requires authorisation under the Copyright Act, (like all legal points, it’s not quite as simple as this, as there are some exceptions in the copyright legislation, but their scope is still open to argument) so the copyright owner has a lot more opportunity to intervene and control usage.
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Why? Simple: using this key — the secret piece of the puzzle — people can now build hardware and free software compatible with HDMI, that can decrypt the encrypted video traversing between HDMI-compliant equipment, without having to obey the restrictions imposed by the HDMI oligopoly. Game over — pirates 1, digital restrictions management AACSholes 0. One more note: using this key might be illegal in some parts of the world — but whoever cares about what’s right can’t afford to care about what’s legal.
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After a new technology is introduced to the market, there is usually a predictable decrease in price as it becomes more common. Laptops experienced precipitous price drops during the past decade. Digital cameras, personal computers, and computer chips all followed similar steep declines in price. Has the price of broadband Internet followed the same model? Shane Greenstein decided to look into it.
Since there are no public data on what has happened to broadband prices over the last decade, Shane Greenstein, a professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, and his co-author Ryan McDevitt, a graduate student at Northwestern University, analyzed the contracts of 1,500 DSL and cable service providers from 2004 to 2009. They found evidence of only a very small price drop, between 3 and 10 percent, nothing like the rates of price decrease that characterize the rest of the electronic world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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This is important. If you are seeking to understand what is happening and how to respond to it, calling it “theft” immediately shuts the door on a variety of important points. It closes off a path to understanding both what’s happening and how one might best deal with it. I find that incredibly dangerous from the perspective of a content creator. Calling infringement theft or not isn’t just a semantic argument from people who like to argue. It’s about actually understanding what’s going on, and that’s simply not possible when you put up a wall to understanding.
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Because libertarians reflexively (and correctly) favor strong enforcement of property rights, we need to be careful about too credulously accepting the “property rights” frame for proposals to create or expand legal privileges. Such arguments can be found in a wide variety of fields, including gene patents, the recording industry, and spectrum policy. Clear and predictable property rules are a tremendous engine of economic growth and individual liberty. But Seeing Like a State reminds us that the creation of new property rights can sometimes be a process of expropriation, with the state inventing new rights to transfer wealth to parties with political power.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the new property rights whose creation Scott describes in Seeing Like a State had positive consequences in the long run, but it’s hard to deny that some of the short-run consequences were deeply illiberal, transferring wealth from ordinary peasants to those who had the closest ties to the state. When large firms deploy the rhetoric of property rights in defense of creating new legal privileges for themselves, libertarians especially need to employ an appropriate degree of skepticism.
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Copyrights
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An extensive study into the effect of digitalization on the music industry in Norway has shed an interesting light on the position of artists today, compared to 1999. While the music industry often talks about artists being on the brink of bankruptcy due to illicit file-sharing, the study found that the number of artists as well as their average income has seen a major increase in the last decade.
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Some time ago, prompted by truly horrifying customer service and useless web interfaces of certain domain registrars, I decided to move all of CC’s domains to Gandi.net. I had had my personal domains with Gandi for quite some time, and had been very happy with the customer service and web management interface. Also, other people on the tech team at CC commented on the good experiences they had always had with Gandi.
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The NY Times ran a bombshell article over the weekend in which it reported that Russia has been using the pre-text of intellectual property enforcement to seize computers from NGO groups involved in advocacy and dissent. The article notes that the authorities have been receiving active assistance from Microsoft, which had been delivering statements describing the company as a victim and asking for criminal charges against the NGO groups. While human rights groups had been pressing Microsoft to address the issue for months, it only responded yesterday after the article’s publication. The company now says it will offer free blanket licences for its products to NGOs to prevent actions under the guise of IP enforcement. It will also establish a new legal assistance program to assist NGOs who need to respond to enforcement actions.
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Stories like this always amuse me, because, of course, it wasn’t that long ago that all we heard was how evil such “infringers” were, in creating their own videos “using music that doesn’t belong to them.” It’s always nice to see musicians realize that fans making videos are fans making videos, rather than threatening them with infringement claims.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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People accused of unlawful filesharing by the music and film industries will have access to a free appeals system, the coalition government said today.
Tory broadband minister Ed Vaizey said there will be no cost for the public to appeal against Digital Economy Act (DEA) copyright infringement notices, at least initially.
However, the Department for Business will closely monitor the free appeals system, and reserve the right to introduce “small fees” later, because it “risks the possibility of large numbers of unnecessary appeals”. Appeals will be heard by a new tribunal.
Michael Moore: ‘We Should Always Stand Up Against the Angry Mob’
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Asia, Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 1:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft has begun dumping against GNU/Linux in Russian non-profits after getting exposed for its role attacking those very same non-profits
Russian schools are under attack by Microsoft and IDG and all Russian citizens are under attack by Microsoft and corrupt officials. There are many follow-up articles about the subject and also this report from Dallas News:
Russian officials raid opposition groups under pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software
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As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving pivotal assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In numerous politically tinged inquiries across Russia, Microsoft lawyers have staunchly backed the police.
Interviews and a review of law-enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups to refrain from working with the authorities.
Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police.
“Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”
The Moscow Helsinki Group sent a letter to Microsoft saying that the company was complicit in “the persecution of civil society activists.”
It seems like Microsoft PR agents have begun working overtime because of this. We had some readers report to us mass-hypnosis in social networking platforms like Reddit, where Microsoft and its apologists are trying to spin it to their advantage and thus look good. “Microsoft will create a new unilateral software license for NGOs: free, legal copies,” says one source. This is utterly shameful damage control from PR puppet Ina Fried and the PR/official blog where Brad Smith spins this embarrassment and dumps more proprietary software (lock-in). Rui Seabra ponders, “proof of feeling pressure from GNU/Linux adoption by NGOs, which could trigger network effects against them. Illegal dumping?”
Harish Pillay says: “use FOSS please!”
Microsoft basically ran with its tail between its legs and its apologists were spinning the original stories by claiming that the dissidents were the ‘bad guy’ and Microsoft’s framing of them was therefore justified and even commendable. Amazing spin!
Now they crave credit for dumping (reversing the situation), which resembles what Microsoft seemingly did with NGOs from India. Here’s more about that reversal [1, 2, 3]: [via]
Microsoft announced sweeping changes on Monday to ensure that the authorities in Russia and elsewhere do not use crackdowns on software piracy as an excuse to suppress advocacy or opposition groups, effectively prohibiting its lawyers from taking part in such cases.
Had they not been caught and shamed, nothing would be done. The so-called ‘donation’ is serving Microsoft, it’s by no means charitable at all. The dependency is an asset to Microsoft, even if only a long-term asset. █
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Posted in Europe, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 12:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Not what Nokia’s founder had in mind
Summary: As Microsoft replaces Nokia’s CEO, Anssi Vanjoki already jumps ship and the BBC is excluding Free software users after hiring many managers from Microsoft UK
EARLIER on in the week we wrote about Nokia’s CEO coming from Microsoft and we mentioned what Microsoft was doing inside the BBC in one of these two posts, which debated entryism [1, 2]. Well, guess what? The crisis at Nokia already deepens. Just days after the Microsoft appointment at Nokia, Anssi Vanjoki is leaving, maybe to protest (can he now be replaced by another person from Microsoft?). As TechCrunch put it for those who don’t know Vanjoki:
Imagine if Jonathan Ive, the designer of the Mac and the iPhone, walked out of Apple one day before its world developer’s conference? Well that’s the kind of impact of the resignation today of Anssi Vanjoki, who has announced his departure one day before Nokia World, the company’s major annual event. Vanjoki was widely seen as being the potential ‘Steve Jobs” of Nokia – a product obsessive who could get things done.
In a separate new post there is reassurance that MeeGo goes ahead as planned but so does Symbian:
Just after the keynote, I spent 15 minutes with Vanjoki and pressed him more about MeeGo. “The platform,” he told me, “is the next part of our strategy, following Symbian in the smartphone market.” According to Vanjoki, a reworked Symbian has “caught up” to other platforms, and MeeGo is the product platform that will catch competitors flat-footed. With bluster and confidence, Vanjoki described the next generation of portable computers powered by MeeGo, pointing out that I’ll want to carry a MeeGo device instead of the MacBook I lugged to Nokia World. If that isn’t some attitude, I don’t know what is.
In our most recent post about the BBC (and Nokia) we showed that even more Microsoft managers are entering and influencing strategic areas (strategic to Microsoft). In response to what Microsoft staff does inside the BBC, the Open Source Consortium has just published its formal Ofcom complaint:
The BBC led consortium developing Project Canvas are looking to develop yet another walled garden. As such, the OSC believes this will have adverse consequences for the device and software sector, diminishing consumer choice and causing inevitable consumer harm.
We have asked Ofcom, the industry regulator, to look at the wider effects on the device and software market.
These wider effects will be the result of the BBC and its joint venture partners limiting technology choice, setting arbitrary access conditions and enforcing mandated branding decisions
Later on, the brilliant Mark Ballard covered this too:
Open source Brits charge BBC with foul play
The UK’s Open Source Consortium has filed an official complaint against the BBC and its partners in Project Canvas, the joint venture designing a proprietary standard for Internet media players.
The Canvas confederacy, which includes the most prominent of the UK’s terrestrial television broadcasters – the BBC, Channel 4 , Channel 5 and ITV – has already attracted complaints from rival broadcasters Sky and Virgin Media.
Now they’ve been joined by the OSC, which lodged a complaint this weekend to UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom, on behalf of the computer industry.
The OSC told Ofcom that Project Canvas would drive an anti-competitive wedge into the market for computer operating systems and media software.
It’s not BBC staff that’s doing this. It’s former Microsoft staff which entered the BBC, probably having been invited by other former Softies (Microsoft UK) who had entered beforehand. This type of thing happened in other companies and we gave examples the other day. At taxpayers’ expense they carry on excluding users of free/libre operating systems. How convenient.
Microsoft Nick’s headline asks: “Is Microsoft the puppetmaster?”
Nick refers to Microsoft’s rather apparent role in attacking Google by proxy right now [1, 2, 3, 4], not just GNU/Linux users.
Microsoft denied to comment specifically on the Texas investigation, though a source said the company has not received any formal requests for information from the attorney general’s office. (No formal request is needed — investigators can call up companies for information without sending official requests.)
“OOXML Paoli”, whom we recently found spinning a great deal for Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], is now bringing to Microsoft yet another ‘Open Source’ insider, Gianugo Rabellino. That’s what Microsoft is good at doing. It’s good at intruding things like the most recent OpenOffice.org event. It’s mastery of entryism. How long can some people pretend that Microsoft is not a huge problem and its employees are corporate poison? █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, KDE, Marketing, Novell, OpenSUSE at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: OpenSUSE flavour in marketing of KDE and a look at Novell’s marketing as of late, which is all about proprietary software
THE OPENSUSE Web site has this new post about KDE bugs and another new post speaks about the OpenSUSE KDE repository. No doubt OpenSUSE plays an important role in KDE development. Another new post offers an OpenSUSE Build Service cheat sheet and Jos Poortvliet, the new OpenSUSE community manager (also key KDE person), praises Build Service:
openSUSE is far more conservative when it comes to upgrading packages in the stable release. Making it a much more stable platform. So, that means you’re always a bit behind and you can’t have the latest and greatest? No! openSUSE users CAN have their cake and eat it too. Thanks to the Build Service, newer versions of enduser applications and libraries can be entirely build against the stable distribution, lowering the number of packages you need to pull in and thus increasing stability.
To a certain extent, Poortvliet is responsible for marketing KDE but his paymaster urges him to market OpenSUSE. How can objectiveness be maintained under such pressures? Can one consolidate two roles without a conflict of interest?
Historically, Novell has been good at marketing, not necessarily at execution (not in recent years anyway, as it suffered a brain drain). Some years ago Novell made commercials for GNU/Linux, but ever since it signed a deal with Microsoft there has been almost nothing of this kind. Even right now, the videos produced by Novell promote Novell Teaming (proprietary) and user “Novelldemo” uploaded many Novell Pulse videos this month, starting with this one. Pulse is also proprietary. It has been a long time since Novell produced anything promotional about Free/open source software. User “Novell” in YouTube uploaded 6 success stories at the beginning of this month [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (there is another one about Novell’s booth at VMworld 2010), but that too has nothing to do with software freedom.
It sure seemed like several years ago KDE rebuilt and rewrote the site so as to introduce KDE as “Free software” (as in freedom, not open source). It would be a shame if Novell’s involvement in KDE changed that. KDE is already being used to promote OpenSUSE (e.g. the live CD). █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Europe, Intellectual Monopoly, Patents at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The world’s monopolist of food, which also puts people at risk while it acquires this monopoly, is connected closely to Lord Sainsbury
LIKE MANY OTHERS IN THE UK, I REGRET being an almost exclusive client of Sainsbury’s, which is connected to Lord Sainsbury of Turville. Based on the following couple of news items, the Sainsbury family is a big pusher of Monsanto’s GMO agenda (Professor Jonathan Jones, the head of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre, is also funded by Monsanto to push its agenda). The new items are:
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The European Commission has recently approved growing genetically modified crops for the first time in 12 years, putting the GM lobby’s profits over public concerns — 60% of Europeans feel we need more information before growing foods that could threaten our health and environment.
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A former science minister has called for the debate on genetically modified crops to be reopened, arguing they are vital for a growing global population.
Ahead of his speech at the British Science Association festival, Lord Sainsbury warned it would be foolish for the UK to rule out the technology.
This led us to looking for some older articles too. Here is what we fished for and netted within minutes:
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His meeting with Monsanto, attended by civil servants, raises fresh concerns about the extent of his role in dealing with GM issues within government and the potential conflict with his private business interests.
The day after the Monsanto meeting, Lord Sainsbury chaired a government- sponsored biotechnology seminar with consumer associations, environmentalists such as Friends of the Earth, and one of the Monsanto officials he had met the day before.
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When we continued to call on him to do the decent thing and resign, Lord Sainsbury continued to insist that he had nothing to do with GM food issues in government. Now The Independent has revealed that, as minister, he met with Monsanto the US GM crop giant, and discussed GM crops and food.
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THE science minister Lord Sainsbury could make millions of pounds from his investments in firms researching genetically modified (GM) crops, including one company closely associated with Monsanto, the controversial American biotechnology company.
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In November 1999 Paradigm signed a deal with Monsanto, which is paying it £30m and up to £9m more in performance bonuses, to work on novel genes. Paradigm will also get royalties if any of the genes are used in commercial products. It is royalties that offer the biggest chance of high returns.
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The person heading the project is Jonathan Jones, who runs the Sainsbury Laboratory. During none of his promotion of the project have his ties with Monsanto been noted. The Guardian reports that Jonathan Matthews, the spokesman for GM Watch, pointed out:
The frontman for the latest GM push in the UK is being portrayed as a dedicated public servant doing science in the public interest, but it now appears he not only has vested interests in the success of GM but even commercial connections to Monsanto.
It turns out that Jones not only has links to Monsanto, he has direct financial interests. He founded Mendel Biotechnology, whose most significant customer—and also collaborator—is Monsanto. Yet, he didn’t provide that information in a recent tirade against opponents of GM, which he wrote for BBC. He went so far as to call them, “fussy eaters”. When confronted with his lack of transparency, he stated to the Observer that he hadn’t tried to hide his connections.
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It is the same gene at the centre of a food scare following tests on rats that were fed GM potatoes. Lord Sainsbury said the virus is owned by Monsanto.
For those who are new to Monsanto, appended below are links to previous posts. The Gates Foundation is also a Monsanto pusher and investor (with an increasing stake). █
- How the Gates Foundation Privatises Africa
- With Microsoft Monopoly in Check, Bill Gates Proceeds to Creating More Monopolies
- Gates-Backed Company Accused of Monopoly Abuse and Investigated
- Reader’s Article: The Gates Foundation and Genetically-Modified Foods
- Monsanto: The Microsoft of Food
- Seeds of Doubt in Bill Gates Investments
- Gates Foundation Accused of Faking/Fabricating Data to Advance Political Goals
- More Dubious Practices from the Gates Foundation
- Video Transcript of Vandana Shiva on Insane Patents
- Explanation of What Bill Gates’ Patent Investments Do to Developing World
- Black Friday Film: What the Bill Gates-Backed Monsanto Does to Animals, Farmers, Food, and Patent Systems
- Gates Foundation Looking to Destroy Kenya with Intellectual Monopolies
- Young Napoleon Comes to Africa and Told Off
- Bill Gates Takes His GMO Patent Investments/Experiments to India
- Gates/Microsoft Tax Dodge and Agriculture Monopoly Revisited
- Beyond the ‘Public Relations’
- UK Intellectual Monopoly Office (UK-IPO) May be Breaking the Law
- “Boycott Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in China”
- The Gates Foundation Extends Control Over Communication with Oxfam Relationship
- Week of Monsanto
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Posted in Intellectual Monopoly, Microsoft, Patents at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Just as the movement against intellectual monopoly is growing, lobbyists continue to find their way into public events and patent trolls thrive
French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard [FR] has just taken a bold step by saying something which I said several years ago. Having just donated €1,000 to an accused downloader (for his legal defence), Godard made some strong remark:
My French is very rusty, and there doesn’t seem to be any coverage of this story yet in English-language news… but apparently, the great French-Swiss film director Jean-Luc Godard (above) donated a thousand euros toward the legal defense costs of James Climent (inset), a 37-year-old French citizen accused of downloading 13,788 MP3s.
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Update: Boing Boing reader Paul R. offers this translation of an important Godard quote in the linked news story (emphasis mine):
I am against Hadopi [the French internet-copyright law, or its attendant agency], of course. There is no such thing as intellectual property. I’m against the inheritance [of works], for example. An artist’s children could benefit from the copyright of their parents’ works, say, until they reach the age of majority… But afterward, it’s not clear to me why Ravel’s children should get any income from Bolero…
Incidentally, IP Watch has this new article about the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Its title has to do with consumer rights over “intellectual property”-protected products (“intellectual”, “property”, “consumer”, and “protected” are all weasel words within this context). Here is what it says:
Copyright and patent laws “are often misused” for reasons that have “more to do with limiting competition and preventing consumers from making innovative uses of their products” than they do with stopping piracy, global consumer advocacy group Consumers International plans to tell a UN internet meeting today. Such misuse includes limitations on the use of third-party content on devices such as the iPhone, and regional codes that prevent consumers from playing DVDs bought legally abroad in a consumer’s home country.
The statement comes in the context of a 14-17 September meeting of the UN Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania. The IGF is a “multi-stakeholder dialogue” addressing various matters of public policy relating to the internet. This year’s meeting is intended to focus on internet governance as a tool for development, especially the Millennium Development Goals, according to a press release.
It sure seems like “intellectual property” works against customers a lot of the time. We covered this before and it ought to be obvious, although stake holders resort to reality distortion fields. Well, who’s attending this IGF anyway?
Based on what we witness, it also got stuffed by Microsoft lobbyists like Association for Competitive Technology (ACT). Here is what Jonathan Zuck had to ‘contribute’ to IGF (someone sent us the transcript of [1, 2]):
>> >> WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you, Steve. Is Jonathan Zuck in the room you got the mike.
>> >> Mike: My name is — from the association for competitive technology. We represent small businesses all over the world. I think the IGF has been incredible in bringing about a discussion in a wide
range of issues. I want to echo Miss Hofmann’s ideas about the deep politicalization. A lot of the issues — again, surrounding the critical Internet resources, that shift from a political discussion to a practical one I think is critical. And I can’t be emphasized enough. There are so many challenges facing us, the Internet and bringing on the next billion users, et cetera, that we don’t have the luxury to
prioritize fixing problems that don’t exist or fixing things that aren’t broken. Because there are so many things that still need to be done.
And so I think depoliticizing the issues and focussing on access and infrastructure development, which is the more critical Internet resource has got to be the priority of the IGF.
>> >> WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you for that Jonathan. There is another person in the room who’s provided a written question. And Markus can read his handwriting better than me.
What is a lobbyist doing speaking fraudulently ‘on behalf’ of “small businesses all over the world”? Why are these people even invited? They only ever stomp on small businesses because they are hired to lobby by those to whom small businesses are competitors. The only “small businesses” whose agenda Jonathan Zuck is promoting are patent trolls who, according to this other new article, are increasingly a problem, never an opportunity.
Patent licensing has become big business in recent decades. The high technology sector, in particular, places a high value on patents and licenses. Semiconductor companies have traditionally led the charge, given the myriad of competitors and patents in the industry, and the groundbreaking licensing campaigns driven by Texas Instruments in the 1980s. Today, intellectual property groups are firmly entrenched in every major corporation – from large communications providers such as Ericsson to consumer product giants like Apple. Each is responsible for growing and/or defending its intellectual property assets, with stakes often in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Fundamental to building and executing any successful patent licensing program is the ability to find and prove evidence of infringement, often through reverse engineering methods. This article explores the role of reverse engineering in identifying patent infringement, and offers some observations about the future direction of patent licensing and infringement analysis.
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The other trend is the relatively steady state of patent litigations. Despite tough economic conditions last year, the overall number of high-tech patent litigations has remained relatively stable (see chart). This is largely being driven by the licensing activities of a growing number of nonpracticing entities (NPEs). NPEs are companies that assert patents without developing or selling any products of their own. Although companies who find themselves up against NPEs have few defensive strategies at their disposal, reverse engineering can help. It can be used to defend a position of non-patent infringement. It can also be used to find evidence of prior use of the invention, in order to weaken the validity of the opposing party’s patent.
Patent trolls are described as “NPEs” here (gentler technical term). It is them — along with patent lawyers and monopolies like Microsoft (who employ the Jonathan Zuck shill) — that benefit from the agenda pushed by Zuck and fellow minions. It’s worth watching out for. It’s also them who spread propaganda about “intellectual property” as they try to push software patents into Europe (whilst expelling open standards). █
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