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10.11.11

IRC Proceedings: October 10th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

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#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

Microsoft Partner Almost Blocked Free(dom) Software in Government

Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

UK flag

Summary: More details about the Bristol débâcle are revealed by the press in Bristol, which also gives more capacity for Open Source and open standards hope

OVER the past week or so we have quietly posted some links about the Bristol situation, primarily in our daily links, e.g. this, this, and other accumulations (look under the “government” section).

It seems as though the city of Bristol, which has come under pressure from investigative journalists and other factors, decided to reconsider Free/open source software after flip-flopping for a while. It seems as though the Microsoft Movement, with all of its ‘extended family’ across the world, has been working in unison to eliminate competition. We saw that in ballot stuffing for OOXML (or against ODF) and following the Bristol-based Microsoft-esque ‘security’ FUD that we recently wrote about we discover who was at least partly responsible for the weird decision to withdraw from Free/open source software [1, 2], This new article from the Bristol press tells the story like this:

Bristol City Council has been cleared to build an IT infrastructure using open source software after a visit from CESG, the cyber security arm of the UK intelligence services.

Complaints about CESG’s obstruction of open source software were branded “folk-law” at a meeting the security body held in Bristol last week, with council leader Barbara Jenke, Bristol IT chiefs Paul Arrigoni and Gavin Beckett, and executives from the Cabinet Office.

The meeting came after it emerged Microsoft reseller Computacenter, which Bristol contracted to assess the policy, had advised the council it could not use open source systems without falling foul of security rules. The advice put paid to the council’s wish to use open source software.

A CESG spokeswoman told ComputerWeekly.com: “CESG does not impose rules on the use of software on any public authority, local government or other.”

She admitted it “bound” councils by security measures but insisted: “These do not prescribe which software authorities must use.”

Bristol City Council Leader Barbara Janke said the decision was “very good news” for the city’s IT industry.

At first, someone from Australia told us that “Computacenter is fully owned by Microsoft from memory.” But upon more research he said we should “check owner ship of Computacenter [UK]” as “[t]he one in Australia was fully Microsoft [...] Before the renamed to Donatech [...] I have a long memory of MS names.

“Of course the Computacenter might not be Microsoft but since it a old name they used there are good odds it is Microsoft. [...] Just took me a while for my memory to assemble [..] found the confusion. Computacenter UK is independent ish long term volume license provider for Microsoft. Computacenter was setup in Australia by Microsoft and was forced to change the name due to trademark alignment.

“Yes, Computacenter being a MS gold partner you we bet large percent[age] of their staff have been through the MS brainwashing to learn how not to think.”

Recently, owing to Cablegate we found out that Microsoft sets up fake 'local' companies to get business with governments that would otherwise view Microsoft as 'foreign' and therefore will be unable to strike deals. It’s a proxy strategy and a loophole. █

Patents Roundup: Backlash, WIPO, Facebook, and Acacia Attacks Linux/Android

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Patents at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The resistance to patents

Carlisle

Summary: More patent attacks and more resistance to patents as a whole, not just software patents

THE general attitude towards patents is changing. There is a popular petition against software patents and the excellent image we mentioned here before is being spread further and further, under the banner “patent evil”. People are finding their voice and they use it to express their sincere resistance to patent monopolies.

André Rebentisch from the FFII, which keeps an eye on software patent issues in the EU, comments on the latest outrageous remarks from Gurry (WIPO) and the corporate press in India refers to so-called ‘IP’ as a “murky world” although not so much in a negative context. To quote:

An Austrian court convicted an engineer last month of stealing technology from American Superconductor (AMSC) and selling it to a Chinese company, Sinovel Wind Group Co. AMSC makes control systems and other advanced electronics, and had developed the software specifically for Sinovel’s turbines. Sinovel was, till recently, a major customer of AMSC, and accounted for nearly 80 per cent of its sales. Sinovel slowly stopped buying AMSC products, which the US company felt was the result of theft of its technology. Companies try hard to protect their intellectual property (IP) in various ways. If you find somebody copying your logo, or even, as was discovered recently, setting up whole stores in China almost identical to Apple Co.’s retail outlets, you can take them to court.

But when your IP is something embedded deep in a product, the best you can do is to seal the unit and make sure not many people have access to the innards. Hitachi put some of the controls it designed for a Chinese company in such a black box.

Notice how they mix together all sorts of concepts including trademarks, using the “IP” propaganda term which Richard Stallman keeps reminding us of. It’s a fake ‘umbrella’ which ties together different protectionist laws. They also say “steal” and “theft” a lot, even though not a single thing gets “stolen”, just copied, perhaps. If we talk about patents, nothing even gets copied.

There is also some patent news about Facebook, which is said to have patented “dodgy tracking” based on a British tabloid (ish):

Despite the fact that the social notworking site Facebook has denied being interested in what its users do on other sites, evidence has been unearthed that it has developed technology to do just that.
An Aussie blogger has found a patent, dated this month, where Facebook describes a method “for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain”.

Nik Cubrilovic said that tracking cookies monitor Facebook users whenever they surf websites with a Facebook ‘like’ button.

Facebook is partly owned by Microsoft and another Microsoft-friendly entity (with former Microsoft staff) Acacia is now attacking Android devices with a patent lawsuit:

Amazon’s new tablet won’t be available until November 15, but it’s never too early to file a patent suit. Smartphone Technologies LLC, which has already gone after Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) and others, claims the Kindle Fire also infringes on four of its patents.

Smartphone Technologies used some of the same patents to file lawsuits last year against other big names in the industry. It is owned by Acacia Research Corp, a publicly traded firm that collects patents and then licenses them through dozens of subsidiaries.

It “didn’t take long for the trolls to get moving,” says Glyn Moody. Android lawsuits from entities with Microsoft connections or interests are not uncommon. We gave many examples before. █

Links 11/10/2011: KDE Releases Plasma Active One, Debian 6.0.3 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 6:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Dave Whitinger, LXer

    I know of Dave Whitinger from LXer, which is a lot of people’s must-read for Linux and open source news (obviously, it’s one of my daily stops). Dave has a fascinating setup. As you’ll read, it’s Fluxbox over Fedora, and as Dave points out, it allows him to use the same user interface for as long as he wants to. Thinking like this keeps Dave out of the UI wars and lets him focus on work. It’s a novel concept…

  • Different computer users, one common Linux complaint

    I guess I fall in the gourmet user category. I decided not to jump into the MS Office 2007 wagon because I could use the previous version quite efficiently. Well, since the version I bought did not include PowerPoint, I had to learn how to use electronic presentation software in StarOffice. Additionally, I didn’t like the Ribbon interface…and they killed “Linxs”. To modify pictures, I used Satori (never liked Photoshop), not MS Paint. And I didn’t use MS Movie Maker to produce videos, but VirtualDub. I required my OS to be able to handle Japanese input. Finally, I also wanted my OS to handle text-to-speech synthesis, to fire all sorts of alarms (music, alerts, actions) and to keep me protected from malware. I managed to learn how to do all that in Windows (with the obvious exception of the latter, which is virtually impossible). To do everything I required, the computer depended on many, many third-party programs to add functionality to the MS OS.

    I never shy away from learning. That’s the reason why migrating to Linux was not so difficult for me…not to mention that I found a friendlier environment in which all tasks I require from the OS can be performed more easily than in the MS operating system.

  • Small Victories? I’ll Take ‘Em…

    Unfortunately, one of her most counted-on apps will not run in Wine or Crossover. Efficient PIM is a great little all-around calendaring app with a ton of features. She has now upgraded to the full version just so she has a license, should she ever have to reinstall. I had a legit license for WinXP SP3 and I installed it via VirtualBox on her Linux side.

    From what I understand, she is now working more than half the time in Linux. Microsoft is in the position to abuse their customer base this way because people think they have to endure it to access their computer.

    I am glad to report there is one less of them today.

  • Kernel Space

    • Motherboards With Broken ASPM On Linux

      One of the many OpenBenchmarking.org features that haven’t yet been fully taken advantage is the opportunities presented by the vast collection of system hardware/software information and logs that have been submitted to this collaborative testing platform from Phoronix Media. OpenBenchmarking.org is much more than just being a storage place for benchmark results. After writing a simple plug-in this morning, here’s a list of many motherboards that have broken PCI-E Active State Power Management support from their BIOS, which can lead to greatly increased power consumption under Linux.

    • Intel’s Brewing A New Linux Driver Release Cycle

      Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center (OSTC) team responsible for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack is drafting new plans for how they release their driver code. The release model and release criteria for the Intel Linux driver will be quite different from the status quo of putting out new releases on a timed quarterly basis.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Desktop Summit 2011 Berlin survey published

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE takes on Android, Apple’s iOS on smartphones and tablets

        If another group was trying to take on Android and Apple’s iOS on smartphones and tablets, I’d dismiss them. RIM, BlackBerry’s parent company, is having a heck of a time getting anyone to buy into PlayBook and while HP TouchPad users loved it,HP killed the TouchPad after only a few weeks. So, why should anyone think that KDE, makers of one of the two most popular Linux desktops, should stand a chance with Plasma Active? Well, because KDE has a long history of delivering the goods with minimal resources.

        So what is it? Plasma Active is not, like Android, iOS, or webOS, an operating system. It’s a KDE 4.x style interface and application programming interface (API) designed for touch devices. The Plasma Active Team states that “Plasma Active is innovative technology for an intelligent user experience (UX). It is intended for all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as set-top boxes, smart TVs, home automation, in-vehicle infotainment. The goals for this KDE open source project are:
        A fast embedded UX platform with minimal memory requirements
        Customizable and modular to support different form factors
        An interface that adapts as users change Activities.

      • Plasma Active One released!

        Today marks a major milestone for KDE Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Active One has been released, primarily for tablet computers. It is the latest expression of the Plasma concept, following Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook. In the KDE tradition, Plasma Active One is designed for the best User Experience—for people on the move and engaged in many activities.

        Plasma Active is a truly open project. It is modular, customizable, and offers an attractive app development environment. The KDE Community and the Plasma Active team invite participation from individuals and companies with interests in ultraportable computing.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd October 2011
      • KDE Releases Plasma Active One User Experience

        There’s several screenshots of this new KDE tablet user experience within the press release. Plasma Active can be installed as a package and there are also live images available for those interested in testing this mobile user experience from the KDE developers.

  • Distributions

    • Tiny Core 4.0 Put Together Your Own Desktop

      The traditions of small size and speedy operation that were established in previous versions of this distro have been upheld in the new release, and believe it or not, improved upon. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you could be staring at a fully loaded desktop ten seconds after you boot from the 12MB ISO image.

    • New Releases

      • Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7r1 Is Available for Download

        Alan Baghumian proudly announced on October 9th, the immediate availability for download of the Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7r1 operating system.

        Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7r1 is the first maintenance update to Parsix 3.7 series, bringing a lot of new features and improvements, and of course many updated packages.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Video: Red Hat on CNBC’s Mad Money
      • Triangle CEOs back tax break

        BY DAVID RANII The News and Observer

        The CEOs of Red Hat and Quintiles, two of the largest companies based in the Triangle, say that a new bipartisan bill co-sponsored by North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan could entice them to hire more U.S. workers.

        Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst and Dennis Gillings of Quintiles were among a half-dozen local business executives who turned out at a press briefing Friday, flanking Hagan in a show of support for the bill that calls for temporarily cutting the tax rate for corporate profits earned overseas. Many multinational corporations with a presence in the state across a range of industries – including Cisco Systems and Duke Energy – have pushed for the tax break.

      • Red Hat will wait on Progress

        Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the Linux software company can afford to delay its move into one of Progress Energy’s two downtown Raleigh buildings while the utility overhauls its merger plans with Duke Energy.

        In August, Red Hat announced it would shift its headquarters from N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus to downtown Raleigh, where Progress plans to exit one of its buildings in conjunction with its merger with Charlotte-based Duke. But a glitch emerged last week when federal regulators sought assurances that the merged company won’t manipulate electricity rates.

      • Red Hat
      • Red Hat to Acquire Gluster
      • Open Virtualization Alliance Grows

        It appears that KVM, the Linux kernel’s built-in virtualization, has become mainstream with the Open Virtualization Alliance now having 200 members. Started by HP, IBM, Intel and RedHat the Alliance seeks to promote and standardize KVM and associated tools so that price/performance and competition thrives.

    • Debian Family

      • Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.3 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename squeeze). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

      • Download Debian 6.0.3 Now

        The Debian project proudly announced a couple of days ago, October 8th, the third maintenance release of the stable Debian 6.0 operating system.

        Debian 6.0.3 brings fixes to various security issues, as well as improvements to some serious problems. Some of the packages included in the previous versions of the distribution were also updated with the Debian 6.0.3 release.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 11.10 In The Offing, Will Have ARM and Cloud Features

            Reports from a variety of sources indicate that the forthcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) will feature ARM architecture support as well as a variety of cloud features.

            At the Open Stack conference in Boston this week, Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical (which makes Ubuntu), gave a keynote wherein she teased details of the upcoming distro, which is due to launch this week–Thursday, October 13th, to be exact.

          • The World Welcomes Oneiric Ocelot: Ubuntu 11.10

            The Ubuntu Linux distribution has come a long way since it’s first release in 2004. It started out as a nicely packaged Linux desktop, built from a specific set of packages cultivated from the nearly thirty thousand packages available in the Debian distribution. Regular six-month releases ensured that Ubuntu would always be close to the cutting edge of Linux and free software development. Every fourth release is a long-term support offering, which gets security and support updates for three years. In the last seven years Canonical, the primary commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has added a server version of Ubuntu, built UbuntuOne, a cross-platform cloud storage solution, and made great strides in cloud computing.

          • Ubuntu 11.10 to Feature Arm Support, Cloud Orchestration

            The next version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, to be released next week, will be the first to run on the Arm architecture, as well as the first edition to offer a new cloud service orchestration engine, called JuJu.

          • Ubuntu Linux heads to the clouds

            Last week, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company Canonical CEO Jane Silber announced at the OpenStack cloud software conference that HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud. That’s impressive. It’s Canonical’s biggest enterprise win to date, but that’s only a hint of what Canonical is up to with the cloud.

            Canonical started its move to OpenStack from Eucalyptus in February. While Canonical has promised its not going to leave its Eucalyptus users without support, the company is clearly pinning all its cloud plans going forward around OpenStack.

          • Ubuntu 11.10 launch interview- Unity is here to stay

            Linux User talks to Canonical’s Gerry Carr to get the full low-down on Ubuntu 110.10 ‘Oneric Ocelot’ ahead of its 13th October launch…

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 1.2.1 and other Updates

              At little over a month ago the Bodhi team and I released our second update release. We were unaware at the time that the version of GCC used to compile the kernel on this release had an issue that caused an issue for some users when compiling and inserting extra kernel modules (such as the nvidia drivers and Virtual Box). This update release today contains a kernel in which this issue has been resolved.

              If you already installed Bodhi 1.2.0 (or an earlier release) and your system is working fine (odds are it is, this issue was only affecting some users) there is no reason to install this new release. It is simply a bug fix release so the ISO image has the updated kernel by default.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Releases Chrome Desktop-Sharing Feature

        Called Chrome Remote Desktop, the new feature is in beta testing and lets you connect any two computers that have a Chrome browser, including systems running Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, as well as Chromebooks. The app can access all data on a remote computer and requires the person sharing access to their computer to give a code to the person who will tap into it remotely. That authentication must be done every time access is granted.

    • Mozilla

      • Future Firefox to slurp updates silently

        Mozilla is changing the way Firefox installs on computers in an apparent concession to enterprise users it previously ruled were irrelevant.

      • Stop Firefox from Greying Out URLs in the Navigation Bar
      • Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs On The Fate Of Firefox In A Mobile Era

        Firefox is one of the world’s most popular desktop browsers, with more than 450 million users. But as the world increasingly turns to mobile devices to access the web, Mozilla is in danger of getting left in the dust. A recent Pew report found that roughly 68% of all smartphone owners access the mobile web on a typical day; what’s more, 25% of those users go online mostly using their phone (rather than, say, a PC).

      • Mozilla postpones Firefox 3.6 update plan
      • Firefox Boounce, Switch Search Engines Effortlessly
      • Mozilla: Rising revenue, but rising challenges

        The Mozilla Foundation, the developer of the Firefox Web browser and an organization charged with defending openness on the Web, plans to report today that its revenue increased 18 percent from $104 million in 2009 to $123 million in 2010.

        Expenses rose, too, though–from $61 million to $87 million–and Mozilla generated less net cash, down from $26 million to $22 million, according to Mozilla’s tax filings. But hey, in case you missed it–Mozilla measures its success by improving the Web, not amassing a pile of cash.

      • Firefox 8: The Next Major Version of Mozilla’s Browser

        While many Firefox users are still working with version 7, Mozilla has made a beta version of Firefox 8 available, and this version can be thought of as the next major iteration of the browser. You can download the beta now. It’s the latest of several upgrades to Firefox that Mozilla has delivered since moving to a rapid release cycle in February, which came in response to machine gun-paced releases of Google Chrome. Firefox version 8, is in Mozilla’s own view, the next big upgrade.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Drives Java Technology Forward at Annual Conference

      One of the side benefits of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems was it gained control over Java, and therefore gained a wedge against its Java-loving rival IBM. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison declared victory over IBM Power Systems in the Java performance category at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week, while at the same time, Oracle and IBM teamed up at the nearby JavaOne 2011 conference to discuss the future of the world’s most popular programming environment.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Foundation Calls PDF Done

      Matt Lee of the Free Software Foundation announced earlier this week from their web-site that this high priority FSF project has been removed from their list since the mission is complete. The foundation cites libpoppler as an open-source library supporting modern PDF features like annotations and forms as now being good enough to mark GNU PDF off their list.

    • Richard Stallman Draws Heat for His Negative Comments on Steve Jobs
    • Eric S Raymond Defends Richard M Stallman Over Steve Jobs
    • RMS – Too Crude to Lose

      When it comes to software freedom, Richard Stallman is a bomb throwing anarchist. That’s a good thing. The FOSS community needs a few bomb throwers in its arsenal.

      His job is to keep the bad guys, those who constantly attempt to usurp our principles for their own gain, at bay. More importantly, his job is to expose them, which helps keep us FOSSers from believing the spinmasters when they use Orwellian magic to convince us that “closed is open.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • A New Experiment in Open-Source Citizenship

      Not long ago I received in the mail a slender envelope with international postage on the front. Inside was a small card-paper placard bearing my name, handwritten, confirming my citizenship in what is apparently the world’s newest nation—neither South Sudan nor Kosovo, of course, nor even a nascent Palestine, but rather nowhereisland. This decidedly more post-materialist undertaking is the brainchild of British artist Alex Hartley.

    • Big Pharma’s Open Innovation Initiatives Zoom In on Discovery

      The software industry was a trailblazer in the field of open-source innovation. Savings to users were estimated at about $60 billion a year, according to a 2008 study by The Standish Group International. Open-source collaboration has now spread to the biopharma industry, among others.

Leftovers

  • OpenIndiana – back and better

    The last time I took OpenIndiana for a test run it was back when the project was first getting up and running. At the time they’d just moved away from the OpenSolaris project and were in the process of moving things over and getting their infrastructure in place. Predictably running a development release of a new project in the midst of a major change wasn’t a smooth experience. At the time some applications didn’t work properly and, though the project’s work with file system snapshots was coming along nicely, the newborn OpenIndiana wasn’t yet ready to face the world. Well, some time has passed, a new stable release (version 151, Desktop edition) is here and it’s time to see what a fully formed OpenIndiana can do!

  • Security

  • Wikileaks

    • Google Hands Wikileaks Volunteer’s Gmail Data to U.S. Government

      The contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor was given to the U.S. government after they requested it using a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, according to the Wall Street Journal. The law allows the government to demand information from ISPs not only without a warrant, but without ever notifying the user.

  • Finance

    • Michael Lewis: The United States is Now a Third-World Nation

      Michael Lewis, author of the new book “Boomerang,” says the United States and many European nations suffered a moral failure which lead to economic collapse. Lewis insists that the U.S. economic situation will get much worse before it gets better.

    • Michael Hudson on #OccupyWallStreet and the Need to Treat Banks as Utilities
    • What They’ve Come to Find at Occupy Wall Street Is America

      Sal Cioffi and Randy Otero are union electricians from Local 3 of the IBEW in New York. They’re working on the Freedom Tower a few blocks over in lower Manhattan. Over the past couple of days, they’ve taken to having their lunch in Zuccotti Park, in the middle of the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have set up camp here. The event has grown sufficiently that it’s now attracted almost as many food trucks and mobile falafel units as it has television-news trucks, so there’s always some place for Sal and Randy to buy lunch. So they park themselves on the stone bench, put their hard hats on the ground and, almost organically, they become part of the event.

      “We’ve had demonstrations, and it never makes the news,” says Sal. “We could have 10,000 workers demonstrating, and it won’t make the news. At least, something like this, they get the publicity.”

    • “Occupy” Movement Comes to Madison, Wisconsin

      The energy from Wisconsinites protesting Governor Scott Walker’s attack on working people in early spring may have inspired Occupy Wall Street, and on Friday, Occupy Wall Street inspired demonstrations in Wisconsin. Around 150 people gathered in Madison’s Reynolds Park Friday night for the first in a series of Occupy Madison demonstrations.

    • How I tracked down The Market

      Has anyone seen him? Has anyone talked to him? Gotten answers? Maybe asked him to change his ways? I cannot think of a single journalist, economists, or policy maker who has interviewed The Market. And then I knew…this was only a job only for Dr. Gal Noir. I wanted to hear more about The Market’s rationale for what seemed to be very disturbing developments. I wouldn’t normally investigate questions that are only of interest to me, but it turns out that The 99% have been asking the same questions too. Of course, we all know who The 99% are. Here are their stories and their faces. But no one seems to know exactly who The Market is!

10.10.11

IRC Proceedings: October 9th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

TechBytes Episode 63: Enter KDE

Posted in TechBytes at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

TechBytes

Direct download as Ogg (2:16:42, 29.7 MB) | High-quality MP3 (46.2 MB) | Low-quality MP3 (15.6 MB)

Summary: Rusty joins Tim and Roy for a show about issues of the day/week

Rusty is back for another splendid show which suffered a few sound issues in the first segment. We start the show with wonderful news about Tim’s newly-born daughter and then talk about Steve Jobs’ death as well as Richard Stallman’s reaction to it. We then speak about Apple’s anti-Android strategy and take stock of Android’s success, noting that Microsoft’s patent trolls at Intellectual Ventures launched recently a lawsuit against Motorola — an issue that antitrust regulators turn a blind eye to. “100 mph (in 2nd Gear)” by Gemma Ray gets played followed by a discussion about Ubuntu 11.10, Unity experiences, and PCLinuxOS 2011.6, which introduced Tim to KDE in a much better way. “Everyone’s Got ‘Em” by White Ghost Shivers is then played and we begin a segment about KDE and tablets, later to mention India’s low-cost tablet, Microsoft in tablets, and the general shift in form factors. “Government Name (Spontaneous Lover)” by Rockwell Knuckles is then played, ending with a discussion about social networks such as Diaspora and Google+. The whole show closes with the song “El Rogadero” by Banda de Turistas.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date. █

As embedded (HTML5):

Read the rest of this entry »

10.09.11

Links – Brazil Defies ACTA, Creeping Biometrics Use

Posted in Site News at 4:38 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

  • Microsoft Appears to Have Blacklisted Oxford University email

    They once, in lock step with AOL and Yahoo, intentionally blocked Truthout email for political messages they did not like. Between incompetence and malice, no one should use Microsoft email services.

  • Microsoft partner, Lockheed Martin is replaced by IBM at the US National Archive Project, which was late and over budget

    Microsoft is not explicitly mentioned but they brag about customer facing services for the agency and the group Lockheed ran included Microsoft heavy partners like EDS and SAIC.

  • The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

    Freedom at Apple was never for users. The corruption visible is simply the logical conclusion of non free software.

    Steve Job’s passing and Bill Gate’s “retirement” mark the end of a damaging lie. Microsoft is run by a buffoon who would otherwise be selling insurance and Apple’s CEO is a businessman responsible for moving Apple’s manufacturing to sweatshops in China. Neither of these companies can parade a heroic founder as emotional justification for their oppressive practices.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Anti-Trust

    • EU Anti-Trust Failure.

      “The Commission considers that there are no competition concerns in this growing market where numerous players, including Google, are present,” the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust agency, said in a statement today, referring to competition concerns for consumers, who make up the bulk of Skype’s customers

      Expect gnu/linux Skype to break soon. This creates a great opportunity for free software like Ekiga. Google+ hangouts are reported to work well but that is only available in binary form so far.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Blocking misfeature of G+

      If you are blocked by someone, you can’t see their posts on your public conversations but everyone else can. A spammer or troll can unblock just long enough to troll a conversation out. Google sends emails for each post but the problem remains. Google has been notified and may be working on a fix. I do not know if other comment exchange sites have the same problem but owners can do the same or worse at any time. Join Diaspora instead.

  • Privacy

    • US companies are using face recognition and fingerprints to control workers.

      Biometrics at Pizza Hut and KFC? How Face Recognition and Digital Fingerprinting Are Creeping Into the U.S. Workplace
      Biometric technology is being used to more closely track low-wage workers, already desperate in a bad economy.

    • German Government Backdoor Spotted

      Chaos Computer Club from Germany has tonight announced that they have located a backdoor trojan used by the German Goverment. The backdoor includes a keylogger that targets certain applications. These applications include Firefox, Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ and others. The backdoor also contains code intended to take screenshots and record audio, including recording Skype calls.

      It’s not a but, it’s a feature of non free software.

  • Civil Rights

    • Alabama Law Makes It A Felony For Undocumented Immigrants To Have Water At Their Homes

      … if an undocumented immigrant pays their taxes, they will be guilty of a felony, but if they don’t they will also be guilty of a felony because Alabama punishes tax evaders with up to five years in prison. In other words, Alabama’s anti-immigrant law effectively makes it a crime to simply live as an undocumented immigrant in the state.

  • Education Watch

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • ISPs “exaggerate the cost of data”

      Traffic-related costs are a small percentage of the total connectivity revenue, and despite traffic growth, this percentage is expected to stay constant or decline … claims of ballooning costs as a “myth”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Software Is Mathematics—The Need for Due Diligence

      there seems to be a category of readers who just can’t bring themselves to believe that software could possibly be mathematics. … People who think like this saw the explanation of why software is mathematics as rhetoric in support of a conclusion. They objected to the overall tenor of the article on the basis that in their opinion the very notion that software is mathematics can’t be true. They didn’t dispute the evidence I provide.

    • ACTA

      • Brazil to debate ‘anti-ACTA’ bill, defying US

        key provisions include protection of net neutrality and the privacy and personal data of individuals – directly contrary to the carte blanche given by ACTA for copyright holders to demand traffic logs from ISPs to identify alleged offenders. The legislation also directly addresses the so-called “three strikes” rule advocated by ACTA, which sees internet users’ connections terminated after three warnings for illegal downloading.

Steve Jobs’ Aggressive Legacy and Microsoft Boosters Continue to Haunt Linux Phones

Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Oracle at 11:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Android is still under patent artillery and those who are responsible for this are named

MR. Jobs died last week, but the mess he left behind him remains for us to tackle.

Google is under a patent assault from Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft, and well as some of the patent trolls Microsoft uses as proxies. Google’s main product to target is the Linux-powered Android platform. One new article bears a negative but clever headline (“Google’s Troubled Search for Valuable Patents”) and it says that “IPVision, which makes patent-analyzing software, says that the 1,029 patents that Google bought from IBM in July contain little that the company could use to either attack its competitors or defend its own products.” IBM and Google are both in the OIN and they have a shared interest in Linux. The transmission of patents from one to another was quite secretive and little is known about it. It’s actually a two-stage transmission that got noticed twice this year.

According to the following new reports, Jobs’ good friend Larry Ellison carries on suing Android, harassing yet more Android backers. Google will stand up against Apple, so we shall see how it ends.

  • Oracle v. Google – No Reconsideration for Oracle

    Just as quickly as Oracle served up its précis letter [PDF; text] requesting permission to file a motion to reconsider, Judge Alsup has swatted it back across the net with a passing shot [486 (PDF; text)]. Too little (did not show good cause) and too late (not timely). So the limits are set on Oracle’s infringement contentions.

  • Oracle Expert Drags LG, HTC, Motorola Devices; Google Objects

    Oracle has filed another brief to rely on an expert report in ongoing litigation with Google over alleged infringement of copyrighted Java in the Android operating system, the Courthouse News Service reports.

    A report by Oracle expert John Mitchell referred to three devices that Oracle had not initially named: the LG Optimus, the HTC Droid Incredible 2 and the Motoral Atrix.

  • Google joins HTC against Apple

    A significant turn has taken place in the HTC – Apple lawsuit. A slight recap on the same would lead us to the time when Cupertino-based, Apple had filed a lawsuit against popular smartphone manufacturer, HTC. Apple had alleged that HTC, by the way of the Android software used on its smartphones and other devices, had infringed on the patents owned by them. Now, search giant Google, who’s also the name behind the popular Android OS has joined forces with HTC against Apple.

Apple has perhaps innovated “embargo as competition” (although there is plenty of prior art). What a shameful, despicable strategy. If this is what makes Apple “successful”, then we should hope that Apple fails.

In other ‘news’ (fake news), Microsoft booster Matt Rosoff parrots the Microsoft Florian propaganda which characterises Google as an “investor” in the Microsoft patent troll which is attacking itself. Slow ‘news’ day for them, eh? They need to recycle some old FUD because of the Motorola lawsuit. This is just more of the disgusting Microsoft propaganda from Matt Rosoff and Microsoft Florian, whom he quotes for more of those same old lies. We saw that routine before. These people are not even worthy of a tabloid. Well, they could do a lot worse than a tabloid. They could run a pro-Apple Web site (where facts are a fantasy). █

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