02.01.12
Posted in Microsoft, Patents at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Why was it let in in the first place?
Summary: OpenStack does not tolerate the proprietary Hyper-V anymore
LAST year we wrote about OpenStack putting proprietary inside open (with help from Novell). According to a Microsoft booster’s update on this, Microsoft might be taken out of the stack as one of the men responsible for it leaves SUSE (more on that in an earlier post). To quote:
Code for Microsoft’s Hyper-V should be removed from the up-coming Essex release of OpenStack because it’s essentially been forgotten about, according to OpenStack release manager Thierry Carrez.
Microsoft does not belong in “Open” anything. Microsoft engages in extortion against Open Source. We’ll show the latest examples of this later. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Patents, Windows at 12:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo by Luca Sartoni
Summary: The cost of Nokia’s virtual handover to Microsoft and the failure to do anything except feed Android enemies
WHEN ELOP left Microsoft we predicted that he would be trouble and when he signed a deal with Microsoft we said it would be about patents. We were right. It was the same with Novell, which had its patents end up in Microsoft’s belt. Here are the posts we wrote about CPTN before Nokia signed a deal with Microsoft:
According to this one report among many, Nokia is doomed (more layoffs of course) because Windows doesn’t sell:
When Microsoft launched Windows Phone a year ago, Microsoft proudly told the world that they shipped 2 million Windows Phone smartphones by HTC, Samsung and others. They soon were spooked, however, when the sales dwindled and dried up and stopped giving the sales breakdown. By the Spring, Microsoft insisted all Windows Mobile smartphones be counted together with Windows Phone – even as these two platforms are incompatible. And still the sales of ‘the third ecosystem’ kept falling, down to about 500,000 units by Q3. And early numbers from Q4 from Microsoft’s best market, the USA, reveal that even more than a year after its launch, Windows Phone sales are still severely lagging its older and obsolete cousin, achieving only 1.4% or about 520,000 units. Windows Mobile meanwhile refuses to die, and in the USA achieved 2.4% market share of new sales according to Nielsen or about 890,000 unit sales.
Thus if you remember seeing a ‘Microsoft’ market share in smartphones somewhere near 2% for Q3, that includes the better-selling Windows Mobile, and the newer and supposedly better so-called ‘third ecosystem; Windows Phone has far less than 1% market share globally.
We now need to keep track of where Nokia’s patents are going. Nokia has a big mountain of patents and it is feeding trolls with Microsoft’s guidance (MOSAID for example, but we will write about it separately). In order to sign the deal with Nokia Microsoft reportedly paid just a quarter of a billion dollars, which is ridiculous. It’s nothing like the rumoured billions. Nokia’s filings reveal that Elop merely passes the keys of Nokia to Steve Ballmer and the company that Elop himself was still a top shareholder of. He should have been sued, maybe even jailed, but the law doesn’t work this way; it sympathises with white-collar crime like collusion, bribes, and obstruction of justice. But that just leads to a different sort of debates that would suit another type of Web site. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Will Europe surrender to multinationals from across the Atlantic?
Summary: Warning signs about the looming threat of the Unitary Patent — a cross-Atlantic gateway for software patents
THE president of the FFII carries on tracking what can possibly serve as a bridge to software patents in Europe.
British politicians recently opposed the unitary patent based on rational grounds and British patent lawyers have this to say about their views:
He also stated that the value of the patent has the potential to be diminished if SMEs do not have the funds to be able to enforce the patent. Such a loss in the ability to enforce a patent and benefit from the revenue streams otherwise associated with the enforcement of the patent and the corresponding market share, would mean that SMEs and other companies may not have the funds to reinvest into research and development. Essentially, the proposed system may result in a chilling effect on innovation.
Indeed. Microsoft is meanwhile employing lobbyists to pretend to speak of behalf of SMEs, promoting policies that would only harm SMEs. Other patents boosters write that;
Unitary patent on agenda for EU Council meeting, happening now
We could not follow this link, but it does seem like something is happening behind closed doors and other boosters of patents say:
Member States commit to reaching at the latest in June final agreement on the last outstanding issue #patent package.
This so-called “patent package” or whatever they wish to call it this year (they rename it to evade criticism or use new euphemisms) is trouble for all Europeans. It is good for multinationals though and they have enormous political power. Think along the lines of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft, Novell at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Microsoft-funded SUSE will no longer pay Greg K-H’s wage, the Linux Foundation will
THE BEST known SUSE developer is arguably Greg Kroah-Hartman. He is dissociating himself from Novell/Attachmate/SUSE starting just about now. He won’t be indirectly funded by Microsoft anymore.
What exactly is happening then?
Instead, he will be funded by Linux backers like IBM and Red Hat. To quote a Microsoft booster:
Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of the Linux kernel’s stable branch and the Linux driver project, is leaving his position with SUSE to join the Linux Foundation in a full-time fellowship role. Kroah-Hartman will now have more time to oversee kernel development and work with the Linux community, while leaving aside the responsibility of working for a vendor. (The SUSE Linux project was owned by Novell, and now Attachmate.)
“There were no direct conflicts working for SUSE, as the people there understand how important the individual developer, and their voice, is in the Linux community,” Kroah-Hartman told Ars this week in an e-mail interview. “But, working in a vendor-neutral environment like the Linux Foundation allows me to spend a larger amount of time interacting with other companies and vendors, as well as helping Linux out in environments that were not necessarily the focus of my previous employer.”
He was one of the main people behind OpenSUSE’s creation. This distribution lost its way. All they have to talk about now is wallpapers:
On a related note, Silva also divulged the wallpaper for openSUSE 12.2. Very much in character of most openSUSE default backgrounds, it’s an attractive, tasteful, and professional choice. Marcus Moeller’s “”Lightray” earned the honor by receiving the most votes in a recent opinion poll.
When OpenSUSE runs polls there are hardly any participants. SUSE will most likely be forgotten in several years. Many of its key developers have already moved on (we covered the departures of selected few). Now they lose the association with Greg Kroah-Hartman — one that they used to take pride in. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux has been gaining some serious mileage over the years. Linux and other high-end Open Source software like Blender are not some hobbyists-only stuff anymore and the whole technology world is slowly starting to realize the positive and unbiased influence Open Source and Linux has on everything technology. Linux was quite prominently featured at just concluded International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 in various different forms. Let’s go find out what those ‘various forms’ were. Read on.
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I don’t know about you but to me the term user friendly is everyday becoming more like a pejorative rather than a feature. Let me explain: I’ve realized than almost everything requires time and effort (sometimes a lot) in order to have it just the way you want it. This is specially true if you really care about customizing your environment . Let me give you an example: vim. Vim is a fantastic editor and in my opinion the best editor around. Nevertheless I’ve spent a lot of time and effort just to learn how to edit with it and playing with the configuration file just to make it perfect for my needs. At almost every level of software tools or programs there’s at least one that take this approach.
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Desktop
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Are you fed up with Microsoft Windows and ready to give Linux a try? Here’s how to get started. This guide for Linux discusses who the Linux OS is right for, what you need to get started, and how to turn your Windows PC into a dual-boot computer so you can have the best of both worlds–Linux and Windows.
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Both Unity and Cinnamon are reactions to GNOME 3. However, Unity is the result of Ubuntu’s inability to work with the GNOME project, not a difference in design policy. While Unity and GNOME 3 are very different interfaces, both are the result of a top-down process, in which the design is chosen by lead developers and allegedly supported by usability principles.
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Userful Corp. announced a new version of its multiseat Linux PC sharing software, now Ethernet-ready and bundled with a $99 HP t200 thin client. The “Userful MultiSeat with HP t200 thin client” solution turns one Edubuntu-based Linux PC into up to 15 computer stations, enabling faster networking than the previous USB-only release, says the company.
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Kernel Space
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The second Linux 3.3 kernel release candidate is now available, which is coming a bit late due to Linus Torvalds falling behind.
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Graphics Stack
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Marek Olšák, the well-known independent contributor to Mesa that’s made a great deal of enhancements to the Radeon driver stack over the past few years, has a new patch-set. The latest patch-set he published last night cleans up the R600g driver and reworks its cache flushing code. This patch-set affects more than 2,000 lines of code, which is significant for this open-source Gallium3D driver.
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Applications
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Miro, a new application for Internet video has been designed to be an easy app that will give users an amazing full-screen show. With over thousands of free videos that can be viewed from the Internet, Miro gives the user the ability to download all the chosen videos they enjoy as soon as they are released.
Miro, first launched in 2005 then revamped in 2007 (it was first launched as Democracy Player), is written in Python. Miro has an embedded WebKit for Linux and(Mozilla Gecko/XUL until 3.0.2). With the updated version of 3.0, Miro offers GTK for new Windows and Linux systems.
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Creating a live Linux USB stick isn’t anything new. And, in fact, the ability to have persistence with a live CD/USB stick isn’t terribly new. What many people might not be aware of, however, is just how easy it is to make a bootable USB stick that you can use like a regular Linux install. Using the “Startup Disk Creator” in any of the Ubuntu derivatives, creating a bootable USB drive with persistence is as simple as dragging a slider to determine how much space to reserve for persistence!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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I’m continuing my look at what emulators you can use in Linux with ones for Nintendo 64 (is this console REALLY over 15 years old?) and the Nintendo DS.
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I grew up playing SNES. It started with MarioWorld and MarioKart and moved into Super Punch Out, StarFox, Street Fighter 2, and UN Squadron. Needless to say, as soon as I found out this SNES emulator was available for PlayBook, I sprinted for my PC, PB, and USB cable to get the retro goodness rolling! I chose UN Squadron as my first screenshot because it is a less well known game that I absolutely LOVE. Sidescrolling airplane fighting action with awesome upgrades and lots of challenging levels. I highly recommend it.
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Games
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The games that comprise “The Humble Bundle for Android” are Anomaly, Osmos, and EDGE. If you pay above the current floating average price (currently at $4.73 USD), you also get a copy of World of Goo. All of these titles are supported under Android, Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux. There’s no Digital Rights Management coupled with the titles and when contributing to the Humble Bundle a portion of the proceeds can be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven’t abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet.
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Steven Shiau proudly announced today, January 30th, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.
Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-10 is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms and includes major improvements and assorted bugfixes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva S.A., the company behind the Mandriva Linux distribution, has been given a temporary reprieve from fiscal collapse, following a shareholder skirmish that has left the ultimate fate of the Linux vendor still in doubt.
COO Jean-Manuel Croset made a brief statement in a blog post yesterday indicating that even though the funds from the minority stakeholders from Russia had not been received, Mandriva had found financial assistance from the Paris Region Economic Development agency that would carry the company through until mid-February.
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The external bid for financially troubled Mandriva has been blocked by a minority shareholder. The news was announced by Mandriva COO Jean-Manuel Croset in a brief blog posting. Croset says the company’s financial situation is though “far better than expected” and this will allow the company until the middle of February to find a new solution to its problems.
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Red Hat Family
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I’m a big believer in “It’s not broke, then don’t fix it.” So is leading Linux company, Red Hat. The company has just announced that it is extending the production lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 from seven to 10 years in response to enterprise customer demand and Red Hat’s hardware original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners.
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Hello everybody, I’m doing a Centos 6 desktop oriented remix called Stella. This has been brewing since the summer and it’s starting to get ready.
I’ve backported a lot of packages from Fedora and Rpmfusion and bundle several other repos, too, resulting in a big range of software available, including but not limited to:
LibreOffice, VLC, MPlayer, Shutter, Arista, Java, Flash, GParted etc
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Fedora
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The paradox. The higher the speed of the CPU, memory, bus, etc., that hardware companies try to sell us, the more people tend to use low-resource operating systems and desktop environments.
Of course, being light on system resources is not the only reason, but one of many reasons why more and more people switch from heavy DEs like KDE, GNOME3 and Unity to lightweight DEs like XFCE and LXDE.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As we earlier reported Ubuntu Dash is getting rid of default useless huge icons (I haven’t seen any use of it yet). The update has arrived. We are running Ubuntu 12.04 to keep an eye on the progress and we just noticed updates to Unity which removes those default 8 icons from the Dash and replace them with more useful shortcuts.
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At the request of many Ubuntu users who hated the Unity interface, introduced with the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) release, it looks like Canonical is trying hard to make it more user friendly by adding new functionality and allowing users to easily configure it.
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Flavours and Variants
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Over the last few years, we’ve seen radical changes to the Linux desktop. Some, despite initial opposition, such as the KDE 4.x re-start, took a while to gain favor, but eventually became popular. Others, such as GNOME 3.x have alienated many users and first Ubuntu’s Unity and now it’s Head-Up Display (HUD) have not been greeted with overwhelming approval even by hard-core Ubuntu Linux users. So, Linux Mint’s developers have decided to go back to the past with a GNOME 2.x style desktop: Cinnamon. So, how well have they done? I give them an “A” for effort, but only a “B” for execution.
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Digi International announced a ZigBee-based home energy gateway that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX28 processor. Compliant with the upcoming Smart Energy 2.0 standard, the “ConnectPort X2e for Smart Energy” enables ZigBee devices on a Home Area Network (HAN) to communicate with an energy service provider, says the company.
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Phones
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Android
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Motorola was infamous for locking the bootloader of some of their devices. But Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola gave us an indication that the company may shed its policy of locking the bootloader of their devices.
The company did promise last year that they will unlock the bootloaders of all their devices by the end of 2011. It’s 2012 and the promise has not been met. To make matters worse and raise doubts over company’s intentions Motorola recently announced the Developer Edition of Motorola Droid RAZR with an unlocked bootloader. This made many wonder if Motorola is shifting from its promise to unlock the bootloaders.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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What does it take to open up a proprietary application and make it a successful open source project? To answer this, Glyn Moody takes a look at some prominent successes and failures and identifies the best practices.
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Mentorship programs help people working on open-source projects build a community, make decisions and to maintain projects beyond their initial idea. Some communities use programs that require one-on-one mentorship, while others allow existing members to on-board new members at their own pace. Either way, these programs all aim to ensure the success of the projects.
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After implementing open source school management software in 15,000 schools under the Kerala Government’s Sampoorna school management system project, the Mangalore-based Foradian Technologies Pvt Ltd is looking at India and overseas for growth.
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Just today, I ran across an experience with Microsoft Excel. A need for generating Code 128 barcodes in Excel came up. Immediately upon looking, there are naturally additional plugins for Excel that will do this. And there are several of them out there, all developed by a different party. They are not super cheap, however, and are about half of the cost of Microsoft Office itself. Not only this, but they are victim to very strict licensing as well. Some offer a one-time cost per workstation, and others offer a site license which must be renewed by year. But the same concept applies, the more you want to use the software, the more you must pay.
Unfortunately where the Code 128 barcode solution is needed, Microsoft Office is deployed currently. Just for personal knowledge, I looked and found that OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc has a plugin for generating Code 128 barcodes, and it’s FREE. In fact, the plugin itself is open source as well.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is currently working to develop a ‘reset’ button for Firefox, which would enable users to work around errors in installation or start-up crashes and fix the problem without losing their data, bookmarks, history and more. The feature would be accessible in several ways, around the Firefox browser.
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Mozilla today made the latest update of its open-source Web browser, Firefox 10, available for download in Windows, Mac, and Linux editions. The update, the latest in the organization’s “rapid release” program, improves the way the browser handles add-on updating, and adds a gaggle of new tools and capabilities for Web developers to use, which in turn, means more powerful and compelling sites for end users.
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Databases
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PostgreSQL specialist EnterpriseDB has announced the availability of Postgres Plus Cloud Database on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users can run either PostgreSQL or the PostgreSQL-based Postgres Plus Advanced Server with the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) cloud service without needing to undertake major installation or configuration work.
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CMS
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Education
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Open CourseWare and other open educational resources are beginning to draw the attention of higher education policymakers and other leaders. Why? These web-based educational tools hold the promise of both reducing the cost of high education and helping learners to complete their degrees by providing access to top quality course materials and instruction.
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Business
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Johannesburg-based open-source software start-up Snapt launched only in August 2011 but already it’s drawing interest from top drawer customers, mainly international clients, including US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (Nasa).
The company uses open-source software as a basis to build server and network management software. With all of its marketing and sales activities being Web-based, the company is finding there’s huge demand for free and open-source solutions that are backed by support, particularly from US companies looking to cut costs by avoiding proprietary software solutions.
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BSD
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The FreeBSD project has published their quarterly report outlining some of the advancements made by this leading BSD operating system in the last quarter of 2011. A lot of progress was made, but still there’s some work left to be accomplished.
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Public Services/Government
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A group of deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has proposed to legalize the use of open-source software by state agencies.
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Licensing
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When I first let the world in on our “little” project to create an open tablet there were some who wondered openly about the licensing of the software. It’s an important question that deserves a clarifying answer:
We are not using the OS (Android, in this case) provided by the hardware manufacturer. We are also well aware that some of the people in the hardware supply chain are violating the terms of the GPL. This was amazingly frustrating for us and caused significant delays as we went in search of GPL friendly vendors. We found that in the market of affordable device makers in China, they just don’t exist. There’s a cultural as well as legal hurdles that have led to this unfortunate situation, and I personally think Google has a lot to answer for when they allow such companies open access to their app store while they must be aware of the license violations that are going on. So it’s an unfortunate situation, but we’re problem solvers, we’re bad-ass Free software developers who see a problem and bang on it until it falls over, right?
We decided to go with Mer, the community continuation of MeeGo, as our base OSS. With the amazing help of the Mer community, we have been able to bring up a non-Android, built-from-source kernel on the device and even boot into Plasma Active. There is still work left, and we still do have some binary drivers, but this progress is already one massive crowbar that’s prying open the doors that have been shut on the world of ARM based devices.
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GPL enforcement is a surprisingly difficult task. It’s not just a matter of identifying an infringement – you need to make sure you have a copyright holder on your side, spend some money sending letters asking people to come into compliance, spend more money initiating a suit, spend even more money encouraging people to settle, spend yet more money actually taking them to court and then maybe, at the end, you have some source code. One of the (tiny) number of groups involved in doing this is the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organisation that offers various services to free software projects. One of their notable activities is enforcing the license of Busybox, a GPLed multi-purpose application that’s used in many embedded Linux environments. And this is where things get interesting
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Data nerds from government and academia gathered Friday at Northeastern University to show off the latest version of Weave, an open-source, web-based platform designed to visualize “any available data by anyone for any purpose.” The software has a lot of potential for journalists.
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Developer tool provider AccuRev will release a package designed to help enterprises incorporate the increasingly popular Git open source version-control software into their development operations, the company announced Tuesday.
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Recently, I started trying to learn Python. And, no, not because everyone seems to be learning to code this year. Doing this has been on my back burner for a while, and I’ve finally decided to take the reins.
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Beer must be sold at all venues hosting matches in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, football’s world governing body, Fifa, has insisted.
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It’s not going to happen, M$. About 30% of PCs are running XP and many of them are a bit old. To buy 450 million new PCs to replace them, in 800 days would need 500K machines per day, about 45 million per quarter. The world is only shipping 90 million PCs per quarter and many are getting GNU/Linux or MacOS. Don’t hold your breath expecting a 50% pop in revenues the next few quarters. M$ has been selling 50 million licences for “7″ per quarter but that includes consumer, business, replacements and new purchases. The replacement part is not the whole ball of wax.
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Health/Nutrition
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“It shouldn’t be this way,” read the subject line of an email I received Friday morning from a conservative friend and fellow Southerner. “People shouldn’t have to beg for money to pay for medical care.”
At first, I thought he was referring to my column last week in which I wrote about the fundraising effort to cover the bills, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, that the husband of Canadian skier Sarah Burke is now facing. Burke died on January 19, nine days after sustaining severe head injuries in a skiing accident in Park City, Utah. I noted that had the accident occurred in Burke’s native Canada, which has a system of universal coverage, the fundraiser would not have been necessary.
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Finance
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Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed to explore a momentous instance: how the mid-90s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group and a friendly Presidential pen — brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they put the watchdog to sleep.
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Copyrights
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The recent U.S. shutdown of the Hong Kong-based file-hosting service Megaupload has led other file sharing sites to tighten their content sharing practices, for fear of facing criminal charges. Seven of Megaupload’s executives were charged with copyright violations, racketeering, and money laundering, while CEO Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish citizen, was arrested along with four others and could face up to 55 years in prison.
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This morning a friend shared with me some amusing American Sign Language videos, and in return I wanted to share with him my favorite ASL video of all time: B. Storm’s interpretation of the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy. Only I couldn’t because it was gone. Why? Because “This video contains content from WMG (Warner Music Group), who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” This is appalling for many reasons, not least of which being the video is almost certainly fair use.
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Newt Gingrich might feel like Rocky Balboa when he takes the stage at campaign events to Survivor’s 1982 hit “Eye of the Tiger,” but it’s the co-writer of the song who is ready for a fight.
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It seems that, in the wake of the big protests that helped shelve (for now, at least) SOPA and PIPA, the pro-SOPA folks have started pushing people to write op-eds in various publications about how important SOPA/PIPA are — while simultaneously dismissing the concerns of those who opposed the bills. I keep seeing more of them, but wanted to dig into three recent examples, all of which show how the pro-SOPA folks are trying to distort the debate through either outright falsehoods, or carefully misleading statements.
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ACTA
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After the Internet’s decisive victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this month, online activists have been looking for their next target, and a growing number of them have chosen the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was signed by the EU last week. Indeed, the renewed focus on ACTA even led a group of Polish politicians to hold paper Guy Fawkes masks—the symbol of Anonymous—over their faces in protest at the way ACTA has been pushed through. In the US, over 35,000 people have signed a petition urging the White House to “end ACTA,” despite the fact that it has already been signed by the US.
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Posted in Site News at 1:01 am by Guest Editorial Team
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Science
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Science is a public enterprise. A scientific publisher’s primary responsibility is to serve the research community. Their own interests—financial and reputational—depend upon the trust the public has in science. Obstructing the dissemination of publicly funded science will damage, not enhance, that trust. The RWA brings publishers and publishing into disrepute. Already, several academic publishers have spoken out against this Bill, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Lancet also strongly opposes this Bill.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Finance
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Anti-Trust
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Dr Adam Whitworth from the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield analyses Home Office 2002-2009 data for burglary, robbery, violence, vehicle crime and criminal damage across England against a range of factors including inequality, unemployment, residential turnover and educational achievement. The results suggest that inequality is significantly and positively associated with increased levels of all five crime types, with effects being larger for acquisitive crime and robust across various different measures of inequality.
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The SFC have successfully used Busybox to force the source release of many vendor kernels, ensuring that users have the freedoms that the copyright holders granted to them. Everybody wins, with the exception of the violators. … A couple of weeks ago, this page appeared on the elinux.org wiki. It’s written by an engineer at Sony, and it’s calling for contributions to rewriting Busybox. This would be entirely reasonable if it were for technical reasons, but it’s not – it’s explicitly stated that companies are afraid that Busybox copyright holders may force them to comply with the licenses of software they ship.
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Censorship
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… proponents of these additions took a few years’ worth of ideas that will make wireless worse, wrapped them up in a bundle, and glued them to the underside of a bill that – if it does not pass – will raise taxes for millions of Americans. In this case, these conditions would apply to spectrum freed up by the transition to digital TV broadcasting, and would impact some of the most useful spectrum to become available for years. … No Net Neutrality Protections. … No Safeguards Against Further Consolidation. … No Super-Wifi. One of the greatest boons of the transition from analog to digital TV broadcasting was supposed to be the creation of unlicensed “whitespaces” or “super-wifi.” This new spectrum – which is much better at communicating long distances and through walls than current wifi spectrum – would be used cooperatively by everyone and usher in a new era of wireless devices.
If this bill passes, it will give new spectrum to the usual monopolists that would have gone to the public and give them a free hand at censorship.
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The real question now, however, is whether this community recognizes the potential it has. Ours is not a Congress that has made just one mistake—almost passing SOPA/PIPA. Ours is a Congress that makes a string of mistakes. Those mistakes all come from a common source: the ability of lobbyists to leverage their power over campaign funds to achieve legislative results that make no public-good sense. … We need a system that is not so easily captured by crony capitalists. We need a government that is not so easily bought. And if only the giant could be brought to demand this too, in the few moments we have before it falls back to sleep, then this war—this “copyright war,” this war that Jack Valenti used to call his own “terrorist war,” where apparently the “terrorists” are our children—will have been worth every bit of the battle.
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Here’s a report of Occupy Oakland being censored
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Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.
The “authorized” sites, of course, would be chosen by the big publishers. This picking of favorites is exactly what Microsoft accused Google of. In private, big publishers demand that power exclusively.
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Great art like this matters too much to passively let monopolists erase it from our common culture. When you find good videos online, consider making local back-up copies. We never know what’s going to be censored when, and without audience back-ups some great art could be lost forever.
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It became almost religious dogma that any legislation built around the process would have broken the Internet and created cesnorship around the world. … PIPA and SOPA would have, in a nutshell, required that Web sites not link to sites “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.
It’s amazing how people can advocate censorship and say it’s not censorship at the same time. Then again, he might be angry because he’s only making $45 million dollars this year.
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I don’t like the bully-boy tactics. I don’t like the idea that justice has to be bought. I don’t like the idea that crushing one man can become a government priority because he offends the commercial interests of a specific group of well-connected businessmen. And I most definitely do not like the hypocritical, moralistic stance that these self-serving moneymen and their hired vassels adopt when they are, in fact, just trying to eliminate someone whom they perceive — rightly or wrongly, but so far without proving anything — as profiting from the usage of their property.
As search engine censorship demands prove, it’s not about stopping infringement, it’s about stopping competitors. People should avoid the misleading terms, “privacy” and “intellectual property.”
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Privacy
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The FBI is looking to harvest feeds from Twitter, Facebook, and the like because “social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” according to the RFI. “[It] has emerged to be the first instance of communication about a crisis, trumping traditional first responders that included police, firefighters, EMT, and journalists.”
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With funding from the Office of Naval Research, a team at Aptima, Inc. is developing software that’d do more than just scan Twitter for trending topics. Instead, it’d mine the web, including news stories, social networks and blogs, to extract topics and phrases that are gaining traction online. … They’d pull apart a web conversation (the author of the post, the site where it was published, the comments that ensued) and try to figure out which parts contributed most readily to the spread of a revolutionary message. That’s a different approach to prediction than the Pentagon’s current initiatives, like the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System, … The software’s overarching goal? Help the Pentagon determine how “the flow of ideas or ‘memes’ through electronic media can … infect and influence susceptible populations.”
Ah the dream is alive, “Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them.” See also this.
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The bill would require companies to disclose the use of such tracking software and clarify exactly what information the software collects. Customers would have to consent to any data collected or transmitted, and third parties would have to file applications with the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to ensure the data is being transmitted securely.
This is weak but welcome protection because the US market is not really competitive. It is much better than proposals to mandate spying by ISPs.
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They repeat the TSA mantras, that they are a transportation service not an airport service and that loss of privacy and property are voluntary because you can just stay at home. For some reason, corporate media people can’t just call bullshit.
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