07.20.10
Posted in Novell, Office Suites, OpenOffice, Oracle at 6:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Andreas Bartel gets elected to serve in the Community Council
IN RECENT months we warned that Novell had become a threat to OpenOffice.org because of Novell’s relationship with (and obligations to) Microsoft. Novell’s Thorsten Behrens, for example, was trying to get elected for the Community Council [1, 2, 3], but the news is in that he is out again:
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:37:15 +0200
From: Cor Nouws <oolst@nouenoff.nl>
Subject: [discuss] Results for the Community Council Elections (2010-06)
Hi everyone,
The results of the elections for the Product Development Representative, held in June/July are now available.
The results are:
Andreas Bartel 27 Votes
Thorsten Behrens 11 Votes
The observers, Mechtilde Stehmann, Sophie Gautier and Drew Jensen have all approved and confirmed the results. My thanks to them and to Stefan
Taxhet, who managed the voting apparatus and to Christoph, who took the main part in organising the elections.
Please join me in welcoming Andreas. I also wish to thank both Andreas and Thorsten for their willingness to serve on the council.
If you want to know more about the current elections, the underlying process, or the Community Council – please have a look at:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council/Elections/2010-06
Finally the request to the project leads, to forward this mail to the project members that might be interested. Thanks in advance!
Kindest regards,
Cor
Andreas Bartel is from SUN (now Oracle). █
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Posted in Asia, Microsoft, Patents at 6:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is trying to collect patents for itself, using students
SOMEBODY from India sent us the following mail from IIIT. The company in question, TCS, is partly responsible for Microsoft's abuse in India.
A concerned recipient of this message has called it “TCS’s attempt to own knowledge…
“Similar to Microsoft’s innovation seeking project competitions. It will come under endowments and i think TCS might get a tax exemption too if it is considered as a charity work. While, they can obtain patents and sole licensing rights on the outcome of the research.”
Here is the message in full:
———- Forwarded message ———-
To: research@iiit.ac.in
Cc: IIIT Faculty <faculty@iiit.ac.in>
Dear PhD students,
Here is an announcement for the TCS Research Fellowship. We received it quite recently. The deadline given is tomorrow. So please act fast.
This is open to PhD students who will be joining this coming year or who joined in the last 12 months from our side.
If you are interested in applying for it, please prepare all materials as given in the attached document and send them to me. I don’t have any more details and can’t answer any questions intelligently.
Act fast!
This mail contains a Microsoft Word attachment, which we put below as text. █
TCS Research Fellowship
Proposal:
We propose to establish TCS Research Fellowships, as a follow-up to the formal declaration of the same by Mr. N. Chandrasekaran, CEO / MD of TCS at Sangam 2009, the TCS Annual Academic Meet, to enhance the talent base in the country. TCS would sponsor an annual intake of 40 research students for a PhD programme in computer science, across India, for five years, starting 2010 – 2011 (making it 200 in the plan period).
The TCS Research Fellowship Details:
Period: For a maximum of four years or submission of thesis for PhD, whichever is earlier. TCS may accept extension of fellowship to fifth year, under exceptional conditions, under its discretion.
Stipend: Rs. 18, 000 per month for the first two years and Rs.20, 000 per month for the next two years (Stipend amount can be revised in later years, at the discretion of TCS, to maintain the prime position TCS Scheme, among the other schemes in the country).
Other Incentives:
1.Support for the TCS Research Scholar to participate in one International refereed Conference, held outside India, during the period of four years, where he has a paper to present, he being one of the authors of the paper. The support would cover travel, conference registration, accommodation and living allowance as per the norms of TCS.
2.Support for the guide of the TCS Research Scholar to participate in one International Refereed Conference, held outside India, during the period of four years, where the guide has a paper to present, TCS Research scholar being a coauthor, but not participating in the conference. The support would cover travel, conference registration, accommodation and living allowance as per the norms of TCS.
3.Support for the TCS Research Scholar to participate in two International / National refereed Conferences, held in India, during the period of four years, where he has a paper to present, he being one of the authors of the paper. The support would cover travel, conference registration, accommodation and living allowance as per the norms of TCS.
4.One time contingency grant of Rs. 1 Lakh to the institute for every student enrolled as TCS Research Scholar to meet any incidental expenses related to the project by the student, as approved by his research guide.
5.Visit(s) & Interaction(s) of TCS Research Scholar to TCS Innovation Laboratories based on projects needs, as judged by TCS Innovation Laboratory concerned.
The Conditions:
1.Upper age limit – 28 years as on admission into fellowship
2.The student should have first class education career right from SSC.
3.The scheme is open in the following broad areas of study only.
a.Computer Engineering
b.Computer Science
c.Information Systems
d.Information Technology
e.Software Engineering
4.The scheme is open for the students who have been found to be eligible for admission to PhD in an institute. The scheme is open only for fresh PhD student admissions and not for students who are already admitted.
5.Students have to be registered as full-time students in the institute/ college where the PhD registration is sought.
6.The fellowship can be terminated by TCS, with one month notice, based on performance review report and also for any violation of any operational rules applicable to all the research students of the institute.
7.TCS reserves the first right of refusal to be an exclusive licensee for a period of 2 years, for any patent filed by the academic institution resulting out of the research work. If TCS does not exercise the right, the institution can go ahead on its own. TCS reserves the exclusive right to market & sublicense to its customers the outcome of the research work carried out under this scheme.
8.CTO organization / TCS Innovation Laboratory will look for opportunities of collaborations with the TCS Research scholar / institute, even beyond the period of internship.
9.Applications will be submitted in the following format:
a.Letter of application from the student
b.Letter of support from the institute
c.Research area write-up – should include a short review, broad problem statement, proposed scope and focus
d.CV of the student – education, grades obtained, honors, publication list, work experience (if any)
e.CV of the proposed guide
10.Applications will be received twice every year, deadline 15th July and 15th December and the results will be announced within one month.
11. The fellowship may be taken in addition to the PhD scholarship that the student receives from other sources, provided that there is no violation of rules.
Selection of candidates:
The key elements for selection:
a. Candidate’s credentials
b. Institute’s credentials for the selected field of study.
c. TCS’ interest in the selected field of study.
d. Academic Research Guide’s credentials
While the institute should select the students for this programme, TCS reserves the right to admit some or none of the students recommended by the institute. Further, TCS reserves the right to conduct an interview of a student(s), if it deems necessary for the selection for the scheme. In such cases, interviews will be conducted in one of the Innovation Labs of TCS and candidates should travel to the designated Lab for the interview. To-and-fro 2nd A/c rail fare from the Institute to the place of interview will be paid to each candidate called for the interview.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Wikipedia at 6:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Richard Stallman at the launch of GPLv3
Summary: The belittling of Richard Stallman follows his reminder of the Mono problem and Microsoft apologists play a part in it
IT IS NOT news that the FSF formally discourages use of Mono (and Moonlight which depends on it). Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza carries on bragging about new features in Mono 2.8, which is essentially co-developed with Microsoft now.
Freedom champion Glyn Moody spoke to Richard Stallman earlier this month and revealed that Stallman had not changed his mind about Mono. To quote the relevant bits:
GM: Could you please explain the problems with Microsoft’s .NET? Is all of it equally problematic, or just some, given that Microsoft has made its Open Specification Promise for parts?
RMS: Eben Moglen told me that “open specification promise” is not something we can rely on.
For the C# language that was standardized by a standards committee, Microsoft was required to make a stronger commitment. But that does not apply to the rest of .NET.
GM: Against that background, what is your current advice to people in terms of using .NET technologies, and why?
RMS: You shouldn’t write software to use .NET. No exceptions.
The basic point is that Microsoft has patents over features in .NET, and its patent promise regarding free software implementations of those is inadequate. It may someday attack the free implementations of these features.
The Source has responded to this by writing:
Team Apologista refuses to honestly acknowledge that the patent promise covering .NET is insufficient. In fact, a favorite tactic of Mono Apologists is to mention some other technology (usually AJAX or FTP) and then pretend the Mono situation is similar to AJAX, and so if one is opposed to the former, they must also oppose the latter, or are ignorant/hypocritical/whatever.
The truth of the matter is that .NET is NOT under the same “promise” that these other technologies are, so this ruse is inaccurate. Shockingly, Mono apologists continue to use this faulty “defense”.
Additionally, much of .NET (and corresponding portions of Mono) are NOT covered by any promise whatsoever – and despite Team Apologista’s occasional concession on this point (often with vague promises to “split” Mono into “covered”/non-”covered” portions), I feel it is not unfair to say Team Apologista downplays this distinction.
At a later point The Source showed that Mono boosters are censoring in Wikipedia, suppressing criticism as others did before them.
Today I was looking through the logs and it struck me I haven’t seen any Wikipedia traffic of late, so on a lark I went to the site and saw someone had (anonymously of course), removed the link to my site, with the following “explanation”:
The Source and BoycottNovell are not trustworthy “news” sites and are known to be anti-Mono/anti-Novell propagandists.)
Note that same users edit history; every edit (excluding a handful back in 2008) is a .NET/Mono-related topic and in every case that I bothered to look at are all non-factual and (in wiki-speak) non-NPOV edits.
Especially devious is how this individual edits articles to downplay patent concerns for Mono, while emphasizing the issue of patents for Portable.NET.
Gotta let people know where they can get that “IP peace of mind” I guess.
umad?
This is just more of the same from Team Apologista. Today I was looking through the logs and it struck me I haven’t seen any Wikipedia traffic of late, so on a lark I went to the site and saw someone had (anonymously of course), removed the link to my site, with the following “explanation”:
The Source and BoycottNovell are not trustworthy “news” sites and are known to be anti-Mono/anti-Novell propagandists.)
Note that same users edit history; every edit (excluding a handful back in 2008) is a .NET/Mono-related topic and in every case that I bothered to look at are all non-factual and (in wiki-speak) non-NPOV edits.
Especially devious is how this individual edits articles to downplay patent concerns for Mono, while emphasizing the issue of patents for Portable.NET.
Gotta let people know where they can get that “IP peace of mind” I guess.
umad?
This is just more of the same from Team Apologista.
Watch the comment which says:
There is no excuse for removing criticism from Wikipedia, no matter how controversial the subject is.
Heck there is even this on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia
So whoever made the change you describe should instead have created a new section on the Moonlight page, called “Criticism”, and moved the content there.
Or created a new page called:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Moonlight
and moved the content there, and linked to it from the main Moonlight page.
Needless to say, I am disgusted by this form of perception management, it has a stench of Microsoft.
But let’s go back to Stallman’s criticism. It appears as though Florian Müller — as misguided as he is when it comes to the subject of Microsoft — has decided to personalise and mass-mail journalists (as usual) with his thoughts on “RMS’s call to boycott .NET, C#, Mono, DotGNU” (notice the strength of the words).
“Avoid .NET and C# at all costs.”
–FFII President“It’s kind of predictable that you and some others will interpret my latest blog posting (on Richard Stallman’s call to boycott .NET and its free implementations) in a certain way but that consideration can’t limit me in my expression of opinions,” Müller explained. “I doubt that RMS’s advice to developers hurts Microsoft but the people who do DotGNU, Mono or software running on top of those platforms may be hurt by it, at least emotionally. And for no good reason because .NET isn’t less free than Java or PHP, as I explain on my blog.”
Müller misses the point entirely for reasons we explained before. Maybe he is trying to miss the point, but deliberate misinformation is too hard to prove. Müller is conveniently ignoring Microsoft’s past and he is whitewashing instead, due to an irrational fixation. This latest post of his makes his irrational defence of Microsoft even more apparent and one of our readers broke Godwin’s law when he described what he saw here. There is more of that in the IRC logs.
“Avoid .NET and C# at all costs. Platform dependencies all the way,” told the president of the FFII to Müller, who replied with: “Platform dependencies are a different topic, I just said #swpat aren’t a particular problem of .NET, C#, Mono, DotGNU.”
Michael Widenius, the founder of MySQL who had Müller as a sidekick while serving a Microsoft board, is currently debating the whole “open core” mess and he says:
To me it’s clear that just because some of your product(s) is available under an open source license, you can’t claim to be an open source company, as that would make the term meaningless. Under such a definition even Microsoft would be an open source company, as some of their products are now available as open source.
On what platform/s? Under what conditions? What about software patents? What about Microsoft’s history of criminal abuse? Does that not count? █
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Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 5:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New Windows Trojans, malware, and the likes of that
• Can Windows kill the Internet?
I’ve long thought that someday Windows’ security problems could foul up the Internet for everyone. That day may be arriving.
It’s not just me being paranoid about Windows. It’s the ISC (Internet Storm Center), the group that tracks the overall health of the Internet. They’re wondering whether the newly discovered “LNK” exploit might be used to slam the brakes on the Internet’s high-speed traffic.
According to Lenny Zeltser, an ISC security consultant, the ISC has
decided to raise the Infocon level to Yellow to increase awareness of the recent LNK vulnerability and to help preempt a major issue resulting from its exploitation. Although we have not observed the vulnerability exploited beyond the original targeted attacks, we believe wide-scale exploitation is only a matter of time. The proof-of-concept exploit is publicly available, and the issue is not easy to fix until Microsoft issues a patch. Furthermore, anti-virus tools’ ability to detect generic versions of the exploit have not been very effective so far.
• New Menace in the War Against Online Crime
Avoiding Web-borne infections is increasingly difficult, because many malicious sites are legitimate sites that have been hacked. But here are four steps to take to protect your computer:
1) Use the latest version of your favorite Web browser, because most have important anti-malware technologies not available in the older models. Consider using Google Chrome, which uses so-called sandboxing technology to stop drive-by downloads.
• Microsoft initiates zero-day vulnerability probe
Microsoft is investigating reports of ongoing “targeted attacks” that reportedly exploit a serious Windows Shell vulnerability.
• Zeus baddies unleash nasty new bank Trojan
Hackers have created a new version of the Zeus crimeware toolkit that’s designed to swipe bank login details of Spanish, German, UK and US banks.
The malware payload, described by CA as Zeus version 3, is far more selective in the banks it targets. Previous versions targeted financial institutions around the world while the latest variant comes in two flavours: one that only target banks in Spain and Germany, and a second that only targets financial institutions in the UK and US.
• MS Patch Tuesday: Googler zero-day fixed in 33 days
• You Have to Wait a Month for Reinforcements
Folks who have migrated to GNU/Linux may have to work hard to make the transition but they can relax a lot afterwards. That other OS and its apps will be around for years drawing attention from malware and GNU/Linux will just keep growing staying small and modular with lots of immunity built in. The cost of fighting malware is almost entirely born by users of that other OS and GNU/Linux gets a free ride. I like that. The cost of monopoly is compounding itself and the price of Freedom declines.
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista, Windows at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at the weakening of Microsoft and Apple in the mobile space
THIS post is not a case of schadenfreude; rather, it’s another reminder of the problems Apple and Microsoft are having as they compete mostly against Linux (but also Symbian and BlackBerry for example). The reality behind Windows Mobile is only made worse by this new and exclusive review by Galen Gruman from IDG. “Don’t bother with this disaster” says the headline where Gruman refers to Vista Phone 7 [sic].
There’s no kind way to say it: Windows Phone 7 will be a failure. Announced to much bravado in February as the platform that would breathe life into Microsoft’s mobile ambitions, Windows Phone 7 looked based on very early previews as if it might bring something new and exciting to the table. Back then, I noted that I was impressed by what I saw — with the caveat “so far.”
No caveats now: Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good. It is supposed to ship around Christmas 2010, but anyone who gets one will prefer a lump of coal. I really mean that.
The Guardian publishes “Windows Phone 7 a ‘disaster’ says Infoworld after developer demo” and it states:
The as-yet unreleased Windows Phone 7 is a “waste of time and money”, a “disaster” that Microsoft should kill as soon as possible. So says Galen Gruman of Infoworld, who has watched an in-depth demonstration of the new phone software at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partners Conference which has been going on all week at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Windows Phone uses a “contact-centric” approach, where rather than doing “tasks” (in the iPhone app way), you are presented generally with contacts, and informed when someone has done something (updated their Facebook/Twitter feed, called you, etc). My personal first impression of the screenshots was “that’s really not going to scale to the point where you have 300 people in your contacts book and 20 Facebook friends and 50 emails and 100 people you follow on Twitter and 30 apps”, but I thought that was just me not following the thinking behind it.
“Windows Phone 7 Issues Could Mirror Kin’s,” said the headline of the Microsoft booster from Microsoft-Watch just some days prior to it:
Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber is claiming a “well-placed little birdie” told him that Microsoft sold 503 Kin phones before the plug was unceremoniously pulled. As pointed out on sites like Pocketnow.com, though, there are 8,810 “monthly active users” of the Kin Facebook application, for which you need either the Kin One or Kin Two. However–as yet someone else helpfully suggested–at least a portion of those users could be Microsoft employees, meaning the number of actual devices sold at retail and subsequently present in the wild could be far, far less.
The South African press wrote about “Microsoft’s mobile woes” (headline again). Ironically, despite these abysmal predictions around Vista Phone 7, Microsoft publicly compared hypePhone 4 to Vista (which also says a lot about what Microsoft thinks of Vista, having previously lied about it). From TechCrunch: Prediction: This Statement Is Going To Come Back To Bite Microsoft In The Ass
“It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that.“
That was Microsoft COO Kevin Turner during his keynote speech at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington today. I’m going to go out on a (not very big) limb and predict that this comment is going to come back to bite Microsoft in the ass.
Microsoft has a long, illustrious history of putting its foot in its own mouth with comments like this. But usually it’s CEO Steve Ballmer making the comments. Ballmer’s most famous remarks are also about the iPhone. After it was announced in 2007 (but before it launched) Ballmer seemed willing to tell anyone who would listen that the device would fail. Who can forget this video?
And then there’s his comment to USA Today: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” He went on, “But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.“
According to The Guardian again, “Microsoft seeks iPad users for in-depth study – via Facebook”
“This reminds me of a Comes vs Microsoft doc,” told us a reader, “something about keep on copying Netscape in order to advance our innovation.”
Apple is in no promising position either. Its reputation has suffered an injury that hypePhone spinners are still unable to cure. In some ways, Apple makes things even worse with its denials. From the latest news:
i. iPhone Antenna Flaw: Apple Remains in Denial
Apple is continuing to face criticism from product reviewers and engineers about the poor performance of the iPhone 4′s antenna. However, it appears that Apple is stubbornly determined to rely on spin to minimize the public perception of the problem rather than to deliver a real solution. Even Apple’s mighty reputation will suffer for it.
ii. The iPhoney
Now Consumer Reports, a well-known and trusted tester of stuff consumers buy has quantitatively analyzed the problem and demands Apple provide an update/fix or a piece of duct-tape. I find real justice in the juxtaposition of an ad for the Sony Xperia on the same page… Cute, eh? You can buy something that doesn’t work from Apple or something that does from Sony. What are you going to choose?
iii. The Woz Experienced Reception Woes With His iPhone 4, Too
iv.Jobs Crashing to Earth
The stench of desperation must be getting pretty thick on the Infinite Loop. Can it be that the generator for Steve Jobs’s notorious Reality Distortion Field has finally broken down?
Two days ago, we learned that Jobs knew of the iPhone 4’s antenna problem before launch. They had warnings both from an in-house antenna engineer and “carrier partner”, presumably AT&T. Yes, this means all the Apple fanboys who had hissy fits at me when I said fifteen days ago that Apple was lying about the problem now get to go sit in the stupid corner.
v. [iPhone 4 cartoon]
vi.Steve Jobs latest on iPhone 4: “we don’t think we have a problem”
Apple has been holding a highly unusual press conference to clam fears about the iPhone 4 and the ‘death grip’ problems some users have experienced. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs seems to be in two minds about what message to get across. On the one hand he says there is no problem, on the other he’s giving away free cases to solve it…
The iPhone 4 may have sold more than any other iPhone in the shortest period, but it has also brought with it the most bad press and a wave of consumer anger courtesy of the now infamous problem with reception when held in a certain way. Known as the iPhone 4 death grip, unfortunately this method is the most common when holding a touchscreen smartphone device such as the iPhone. Even more unfortunately, Steve Jobs himself angered consumers after reportedly telling one buyer who complained ‘not to hold it like that then’. Now Jobs has been forced into backtracking and doing something that Apple is not used to, holding an unscheduled ‘on-campus’ press conference to try and fire-fight the growing media bad publicity storm and calm the consumer ill feeling and concern. That press conference is just now coming to an end, and DaniWeb can reveal exactly what Apple and Steve Jobs have done to solve the iPhone 4 reception problem.
vii.iPhone lawsuit wins class action status
A lawsuit against Apple and AT&T over their exclusivity contract has been granted class action status, meaning it now includes anyone who bought an iPhone between June 29, 2007, and present day and signed up for AT&T service. (Court Filing PDF)
viii.Apple drops Consumer Reports/iPhone 4 threads down memory hole [updated]
Wired’s Epicenter blog points to at least two threads referencing the CR story that have been left intact. Perhaps an overzealous forum manager has now reined in the urge?
If you were looking for a message thread on Apple’s support forums pointing to Consumer Reports’ article ‘not recommending’ the iPhone 4, it’s not there any more. Apple’s support forum moderators deleted the thread. Bing cached it.
ix.Apple and AT&T: Time to Wake Up and Smell the Class Action
While a class action is a significant litigation in and of itself and the outcome has potentially serious implications for Apple and AT&T, there is certainly the possibility that this could now expand into a much larger federal case much like DOJ vs. Microsoft from the previous decade, especially since the US Justice Department has reportedly been investigating Apple regarding monopolistic practices with iTunes and the iPhone 4 SDK.
x.Consumer Reports will not recommend Apple iPhone 4
Consumer Reports said it cannot recommend Apple’s iPhone 4 to buyers after tests confirmed the device’s well-publicized reception glitches.
It added that that AT&T Inc, the exclusive mobile phone carrier for the iPhone 4, was not necessarily the main culprit.
xi.Topic : Duplicate iCal Items after 10.6.3 Update
Months late Apple finally decided to leave journalists alone:
iv. Search warrant dropped in Gizmodo iPhone case
San Mateo County officials have withdrawn a search warrant issued for an editor at Gizmodo, the tech blog that beat Apple to the punch and unveiled a prototype of the new iPhone in April.
According to court documents, the search warrant was dropped on Thursday after Gizmodo editor Jason Chen agreed to submit information kept in several electronic devices seized from his house in April.
Apple may have realised that it cannot always control the message and control its image; trying to do so excessively is asking for trouble.
For background, see:
Apple and Microsoft are both struggling in this space at the moment; this shows that proprietary software in general may not scale well (testing, development, distribution).
It ought to be mentioned that Android too has just had a casualty — a phone that was too restrictive. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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That’s what led to a woman and her son getting charged with a $4,000 fine for picking up a discarded air conditioner. The Consumerist lets us know that, thankfully, a judge has tossed this fine. There are so many ridiculous angles to this case, even if you believe the law is reasonable. First, two people were fined. The guy who picked up the air conditioning unit… and his aunt, who owned the car, but was not in it at the time. That seems pretty questionable as well. It’s a bad application of liability. Just because the nephew put the AC unit in the car, why should the aunt be subject to the fine?
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The UK Government will overhaul libel laws in the new year. It said that it will publish a Defamation Bill early next year in an attempt to give publishers more rights and clamp down on ‘libel tourism’.
All the major political parties pledged to reform the laws of libel in the run up to this year’s general election. Libel laws in England and Wales are widely seen as being very favourable to people suing for libel to protect their reputations.
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Amazon’s Kindle eReader has long been a great device. Unfortunately, for much of its life, it has been far too expensive. And now with Apple’s iPad out there, it seems a bit too, well, monochrome. But Amazon did a smart thing recently, they slashed the price of the device, down to $189. As a result, growth is accelerating once again, Amazon says.
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In short, it doesn’t necessarily matter that the Mail is different. Perhaps its success merely prompts other news sites to be different as well. Not one site covering all, but many sites offering alternative things. Not one site ruling the world, but many sites carving up the globe.
And once we’re dealing in niches and targeting – for readers, for ads – then paywalls become merely part of the debate: not Rupert’s (or David’s) last weapon of every resort.
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It is with great regret that I am writing this. Scienceblogs.com has been a big part of my life for four years now and it is hard to say good bye.
Everything that follows is my own personal thinking and may not apply to other people, including other bloggers on this platform. The new contact information is at the end of the post, but please come back up here and read the whole thing – why I feel like I must leave now.
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Security/Aggression
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In an echo of the debates over the discredited intelligence that helped make the case for the war in Iraq, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday released more than 1,100 pages of previously classified Vietnam-era transcripts that show senators of the time sharply questioning whether they had been deceived by the White House and the Pentagon over the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident.
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Environment
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Recycled Island is a great idea for getting rid of the floating plastic dump in the Pacific. The island would be built where the trash is located and would convert the waste onsite cutting down on cleanup and building costs. It would be between Hawaii and San Francisco in the heart of the Pacific Ocean’s currents.
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Fishermen in Mississippi say they are angry that under the terms of BP’s $20 billion oil spill fund, money they earn doing clean-up will be subtracted from their claim against the company.
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South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off.
Wildlife officials say poaching for the prized horns has now reached an all-time high. “Last year, 129 rhinos were killed for their horns in South Africa. This year, we have already had 136 deaths,” said Japie Mostert, chief game ranger at the 1,500-hectare Krugersdorp game reserve.
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Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have “signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP’s toxic black tide. The contract, the Mobile Press-Register has learned, “prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.”
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Finance
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One of the dire unintended consequences of that maneuver, however, was that municipal governments across the country have been saddled with very costly bad derivatives bets. They were persuaded by their Wall Street advisers to buy municipal swaps to protect their loans against interest rates shooting up. Instead, rates proceeded to drop through the floor, a wholly unforeseeable and unnatural market condition caused by rate manipulations by the Fed. Instead of the banks bearing the losses in return for premiums paid by municipal governments, the governments have had to pay massive sums to the banks – to the point of pushing at least one county to the brink of bankruptcy (Jefferson County, Alabama).
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Financial speculators have come under renewed fire from anti-poverty campaigners for their bets on food prices, blamed for raising the costs of goods such as coffee and chocolate and threatening the livelihoods of farmers in developing countries.
The World Development Movement (WDM) will issue a damning report today on the growing role of hedge funds and banks in the commodities markets in recent years, during which time cocoa prices have more than doubled, energy prices have soared and coffee has fluctuated dramatically.
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Food speculation is one of the ways bankers’ greed harms the poor and puts us all at risk, and the huge investment bank Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest culprits.
Our financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority or FSA, is charged with keeping the financial system stable and safe. We should look to them to rein in the irresponsible food gambling of Goldman Sachs and banks like them.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Federal agents appeared at a hacker conference Friday morning looking for Julian Assange, the controversial figure who has become the public face of Wikileaks, an organizer said.
Eric Corley, publisher of 2600 Magazine and organizer of The Next HOPE conference in midtown Manhattan, said five Homeland Security agents appeared at the conference a day before Wikileaks Editor in Chief Assange was scheduled to speak.
The conference program lists Assange–who has been at the center of a maelstrom of positive and negative publicity relating to the arrest of a U.S. serviceman and videos the serviceman may have provided to the document-sharing site–as speaking at 1 p.m. ET on Saturday.
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The use of contracts and technologies to bypass copyright law and users’ rights must be investigated by academics, a review of contract and copyright law by a government advisory body has said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Adrian Ramsay, deputy leader of the Green Party, has endorsed TalkTalk and BT’s challenge of the recently ratified Digital Economy Act. The two Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies are seeking a judicial review of the legislation.
The Digital Economy Act places an obligations on ISPs to block sites accused of hosting copyrighted material. ISPs are also being asked to retain and manipulate data on its subscribers’ internet activity.
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Back in 2005, we wrote about the rather crazy case of Leo Stoller, the “trademark troll,” who claimed incredibly broad trademarks on single words (sometimes through questionable means) and then tried to shakedown pretty much anyone who used those words for cash. The key trademark he claimed to hold was on the word “stealth” for “all goods and services.” Among those he demanded money from were Columbia Pictures for the movie Stealth, baseball player George Brett for selling a “Stealth” brand baseball bat and (my favorite) Northrup Grumman for making the stealth bomber.
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One of the biggest problems we have with copyright policy today is the simple fact that it’s almost entirely “faith-based,” with no real evidence showing that current copyright laws benefit society. In fact, most specific studies show the opposite — that copyright laws, as they exist today, tend to do more harm than good (except, potentially for middlemen). That’s why international agreements that lock in certain forms of copyright law around the globe are so problematic. They don’t allow countries to experiment with different types of copyright law to see if they work better. That, of course, is one reason why ACTA is so troubling. However, before ACTA there were other such international agreements, such as WIPO and, most famously, the Berne Convention.
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Forward-thinking technologists, including me, have been predicting for some time that adaptive mesh networking would be the doom of the telecomms-carrier and broadband oligopoly. Now comes a scientist from Australia with an idea so diabolically clever that I’m annoyed with myself for not thinking of it sooner: put the mesh networking in smartphones!
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Some of the biggest Internet brands have declared their love for BitTorrent in recent months. Both Facebook and Twitter are using BitTorrent to update their networks and not without success. In Twitter’s new setup the BitTorrent-powered system has made their server deployment 75 times faster than before.
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Lawyers have abandoned a closely watched lawsuit against the document-sharing site Scribd that alleged the site’s copyright filtering technology is itself a form of copyright infringement.
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Even without copyright laws, programmers would continue to produce software. They might engineer the software to work only with permission from the software firm, requiring the consumer to pay for it.
A second profitable business model is to allow consumers to use to the software for free, courtesy of advertisers. Google follows this model.
A third option, and probably most preferable from the consumer’s perspective, is the open-source freeware/shareware model, or software written by volunteers/hobbyists and made freely available without difficult licensing restrictions. Users may copy, edit, modify, sell, or pretty much do anything with the software. (For-profit entrepreneurs are able to take a piece of shareware, add useful features, and sell copies with tech support.)
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We’ve talked in the past about what a complete joke the USTR’s “special 301″ process is. That’s when a bunch of industry lobbyists say which countries are the most annoying to them on intellectual property issues. Then, the USTR sums it all up and says “these countries are problems” and tells US diplomats to go browbeat those countries to have better intellectual property laws and enforcement. Of course, the problem is that there’s no objective research being done. All of the information is heavily biased, and it doesn’t take into account either the actual laws or enforcement in a country (just what industry reps say is going on) or the rights of those countries to make their own decisions when it comes to IP laws.
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I like Will Page, the chief economist for PRS for Music (a UK collection society), quite a bit. We’ve had a number of fun conversations about the music industry and music industry economics — some of which we’ve published here. While there are plenty of things I agree with him about, there are still many points on which we disagree. His most recent paper, advocating a mandatory ISP fee for file sharing (pdf) is a point where we completely disagree. Page’s paper is getting some attention, and he presented it at the same event where Peter Jenner just called for a blanket license as well. But I fear that Page’s paper, while it digs into some economic concepts, includes a few mistaken assumptions that drives the entire paper offline (though, in fairness to Page, he clearly states that for you to accept his thesis, you need to accept his assumptions).
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Before anyone else excitedly emails the IPKat to tell him, let him announce on this weblog of record that the new UK Business Secretary Vince Cable has today axed a number of Department for Business quangos — the top of the list being the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property policy (SABIP). The body — along with everyone else — must have foreseen its demise, since it has already posted this statement on its own dissolution:
“On 19 July the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced changes in order to streamline its partner organizations by reducing the number of ‘Arm’s Length Bodies’. This includes the dissolution of the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP).
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Copyrights
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In the World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands, the referee, Howard Webb, handed out a record 14 yellow cards. Nonetheless, the game turned nasty, as the players apparently concluded that Mr. Webb was all bark and no bite.
Is something similar happening in the French government’s high-profile battle against digital piracy of music, movies and other media content?
Nearly three years ago President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed what was to have been the world’s toughest crackdown on illegal file-sharing. After two years of political, judicial and regulatory setbacks, the legislation was approved last September, authorizing the suspension of Internet access to pirates who ignored two warnings to quit. Early this year, the government set up an agency to implement the law.
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Solicitors for dance music label Ministry of Sound have sent letters to thousands of internet users it believes have illegally downloaded music and says it is determined to take them to court – and extract substantial damages – unless they immediately pay compensation, typically around £350.
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An anti-piracy group has revealed that when it comes to shutting down torrent sites, it is the undisputed king of the Internet. BREIN, which works on behalf of the Hollywood movie studios, says that not only has it shut down several Usenet indexers and streaming sites already in 2010, but hundreds of torrent sites too. There is torrent site carnage going on in The Netherlands and we’ve failed to report on any of it.
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In a full trial the Amsterdam Court has confirmed an earlier judgment and ordered The Pirate Bay to stop all their activities in The Netherlands. The Court ruled that the site’s operators were assisting copyright infringement. If the three ‘operators’ fail to ban Dutch users, they will have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day.
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A Dutch court has ruled that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don’t have block customer access to The Pirate Bay. According to the court, there is no evidence that the majority of the ISPs’ users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.
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The troubles for U.S. based BitTorrent users who share movies without permission is far from over. The United States Copyright Group (USCG) has called in the help of 15 law firms to file lawsuits against BitTorrent users who refuse to settle. For those who are willing to pay, the USCG has set up a portal where alleged file-sharers can conveniently pay their settlements online.
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“It seems to me that in the online world, the marginal cost of a digital file is essentially zero,” he says, making it an “inescapable reality” that the digital world is pushing the price of music towards zero.
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You’ve got to love it when you find out you are making a difference. And you know you are making a difference when after you write an article critical of a politician, the politician in question blocks you from following them on Twitter. Seriously. I’m a Canadian citizen, interested in Canadian Heritage, who’s Mother-In-Law is Poet Laureate for her city, who’s wife is a Canadian singer-song writer, who’s daughter is a Canadian photographer, who’s son is a Canadian videographer, who’s brother-in-law is a graphics artist/novelist, who’s sister-in-law is a graphics artist, and who has a lot of friends who are artists.
[...]
In my opinion his best option at this point is to issue an apology to everyone who doesn’t agree with Bill C-32, all of whom he insulted by calling them radical extremists. Of course because this is his best option, it doesn’t mean that he will do it. I suspect that he’s really annoyed with me at present, and that I made the suggestion will annoy him further.
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And, again, no one is saying that creators shouldn’t get paid or shouldn’t make a living. They’re just saying that it’s your responsibility to find the right business model, and to adapt when the market changes. That’s not “amazing.” It’s basic economics.
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She claims that her image is one of the main reasons the album sold so well, so she wants $2 million. Does she really think that if the band had put a different image of a girl staring off into space on the cover, there would have been noticeably different sales?
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The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) claims it’s the trade organization that supports and promotes the creative and financial vitality of the major music companies. No, it’s not. It’s designed to support a broken, old business model of selling CDs to frightened music lovers. No where do you see that more than the RIAA spending $17.6 million in 2007 to recover a mere $391,000.
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ACTA
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Before examining the changes, it should be noted that there remain doubts about whether this chapter even belongs in ACTA. Both Canada and Mexico have reserved the right to revisit all elements of this chapter at a later date, suggesting that both countries have concerns about the digital enforcement chapter. Moreover, there are still disputes over the scope of the Internet chapter, with the U.S., Australia, NZ, Canada, Singapore and Mexico seeking to limit the chapter to trademark and copyright, while Japan, the EU, and Switzerland want to extend it to all IP rights. Without resolving this issue, there is no digital enforcement in ACTA.
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The main progressive group in the European Parliament today complained to EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht, that Euro MPs have been denied the documents on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations.
Mr De Gucht today held a one-hour discussion with members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs at the European Parliament. But S&D MEPs said there could be no serious debate since members do not know the content of the negotiations.
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With yesterday’s leak of the full ACTA text (updated to include the recent round of talks in Lucerne) the simmering fight between the U.S. and the E.U. on ACTA is now being played out in the open. During the first two years of negotations, both sides were at pains to indicate that there was no consensus on transparency and the treaty would not change their domestic rules. Over the past four months, the dynamic on both transparency and substance has changed.
The turning point on transparency came as a result of two events in February and March. First, a Dutch government document leak that identified which specific countries were barriers to transparency. Once identified, the named European countries quickly came onside to support release of the text, leaving the U.S. as the obvious source of the problem. Second, the European Parliament became actively engaged in the ACTA process and demanded greater transparency. As the New Zealand round approached, it was clear that the Europeans needed a resolution on transparency. The U.S. delegation used the transparency issue as a bargaining chip, issuing a release at the start of the talks that it hoped that enough progress could be made to allow for consensus on sharing the text. The U.S. ultimately agreed to release the text, but subsequent events indicate that it still views transparency as a bargaining chip, rather than as a commitment.
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Thanks to La Quadrature Du Net we now have a leak of the consolidated text for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) after the Luzern round of negotiations. It is always difficult to analyse texts that are in the drafting process, but we can now get a better idea of possible changes to national legislation. If the most restrictive aspects of the text were passed tomorrow, what would it change in UK law? This is a wide-ranging agreement, so I will try to concentrate on the copyright aspects. When there are different options in the text, I will choose the one that seems more restrictive, so this analysis is a worst-case scenario. I am also going not going to go in detail into the changes brought about by the Digital Economy Act, as some of the most substantive issues are under consultation.
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What a surprise! Despite the best efforts of at least one negotiating party, the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) text has leaked, again. This post looks at last night’s leak, and at the negotiations. In short, though: the text is an improvement that continues to have significant problems. The negotiations face some significant obstacles right now – but continue at break-neck speed, and I have this sinking feeling that ACTA could be spawning at least one evil little mini-me already…
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CLUG Talk – 11 Mar 2008 – BackupPC with rdiff-backup (2008)
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Free software and Open Source, taken over the past 5 days or so
- Vodafone Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Innovation
Vodafone Group will make its location based services software open source on http://oss.wayfinder.com. The code will be made available on github. The aim is to offer other organisations the opportunity to use a code base which has been developed over the past decade so that they can build new and innovative navigation products which widen choice for consumers.
- Adobe Announces Open-Source Collaboration with Sourceforge
Today, Adobe announced an expansion of its open-source activities and a collaboration with Sourceforge, called “Open@Adobe.”
- Women in free software: Recommendations from the Women’s Caucus
Nearly a year ago the FSF held a mini-summit for women in free software to investigate practical ways to increase the number of women involved in the free software community. Those that attended the summit formed the Women’s Caucus, and have been working to develop practical policy to recommend to the FSF and the wider free software community. Today, we are publishing the Caucus’s initial findings and recommendations.
- Remix This Game — a Free Software Experiment
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Web Browsers
- India Gets a “National Browser”, EpicBrowser – Your Grandma Will Love this
Well, a bunch of geeks still believe that none of the standard browsers cater to India needs and this is what they have done – launched a browser for the Indian market.
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Mozilla
- Can Mozilla Deliver an Open App Store?
In a talk delivered last Wednesday at the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada, Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs, asked an audience of more than 150 Web developers a hypothetical question: what would an “open” Web app store look like? The answer could play an important role in the future of personal computing.
- Firefox Home: Adults Only
Apple posted the Firefox Home application, which complies with Apple’s policies by using WebKit as opposed to Gecko. Regardless, for whatever reason Apple feels that Firefox Home is a NC-17 application.
- Mozilla Would Like to Pick Your Brain – Revising the MPL
Can we talk about licenses for a bit? It’s something I’ve wanted to talk to you about for a long time, and it’s a good time for it, because Mozilla is redrafting its license and would like your input.
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OpenSolaris/Oracle
- A Considered Future For OpenSolaris
You may have seen some of the news reporting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting that was held last Monday (I am an elected member of the Board). At a meeting with an unusually large number of community observers, we discussed how to respond to the 100% radio silence the OGB has experienced from the new owners of the OpenSolaris copyright and infrastructure. I believe we reached a balanced and well-considered conclusion and remain hopeful of a good outcome.
[...]
There are two choices for the final step. In one, the OGB are able to liaise effectively with empowered Oracle staff to devise a new direction for the OpenSolaris community. The other is one we hope we will not need to take, of recognizing we have no further means available to act and using the formal mechanism defined in the OpenSolaris governance for exactly this situation. Here’s hoping.
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WordPress
- Themes are GPL, too
If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license. There have been some questions in the community about whether the GPL applies to themes like we’ve always assumed. To help clarify this point, I reached out to the Software Freedom Law Center, the world’s preëminent experts on the GPL, which spent time with WordPress’s code, community, and provided us with an official legal opinion. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
- The #thesiswp Controversy: WordPress, Themes and the GPL
There are really only two interesting questions here as far as I’m concerned. Does Thesis have the right to not adhere to the terms of the GPL? And independent of that question, does it make business sense for them to not adhere to the license?
- U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs
After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.
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Semi-Open Source (“Core”)
- Some Thoughts on Open
Open Source is at the heart of SugarCRM’s business. Well over half of our engineering effort produces code that is released under an OSI approved license. We have three versions of our Sugar CRM product: Community Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is licensed under version 3 of the AGPL, and has been licensed under some version of the GPL or AGPL since early 2007. Prior to that it was available under several variants of the MPL.
- ✍ On the term “open source business”
I’ve been having a number of conversations in e-mail on the subject of open core business models. The problem that keeps coming up is that there are a range of behaviours exhibited, some of which are acceptable to pragmatists and some of which cross the line into abusing the term “open source”. Where should we draw the line in? When is it acceptable for a company to call itself “an open source business” and when is it not?
[...]
The fact is, the community edition and the commercial editions have disjoint user bases. The community edition is used by a group of people who have the time and skills to deploy by themselves and who have no need of the many differences of the commercial versions. The commercial versions are feature-rich and effectively lock their users into a traditional commercial ISV relationship with the vendor. If these two were kept distinct, there would probably be no pragmatic issue (naturally Free Software purists would still protest the existence of closed code, but that’s not a part of this particular argument).
- Really Open Source Cloud Computing Arrives At Last
I’m still waiting to hear back from Eucalyptus about this, but if it’s true it’s a significant case study in the consequences of the open core model, both for the company using it, for their customers and for the community they have gathered around the code. Open core obstructed NASA’s freedom to modify the code to suit their needs as well as leading to the creation of a powerful competitor for Eucalyptus. I wrote recently that open core is bad for you; this seems a powerful demonstration of that observation in action.
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Wine
- Wine Announcement
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 1.2 is now available.
This release represents two years of development effort and over 23,000 changes. The main highlights are the support for 64-bit applications, and the new graphics based on the Tango standard.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Government
- Creating a FLOSS Roadmap, brick by BRIC
Last year I attended Open World Forum in Paris. It was a lively conference with broad representation of industry leaders, community organizers, and government officials and administrators. The warm reception by the Mayor’s office in Paris (at the Hôtel de Ville) underscored what has become increasingly obvious in the analysis of economic statistics: open source software is appreciated, in Paris, France, and Europe. My reflections on the subject of last year’s topic, the digital recovery, were captured in the blog posting From Free to Recovery. This year, the agenda of the Open World Forum (Sept 30-Oct 1, 2010) is more ambitious, and I am pleased to be on the program committee, an editor of the 3rd edition of the FLOSS 2020 Roadmap document, as well as one of the organizers of a think-tank session focused on, and beyond, the role of open source software and the future of the BRIC thesis.
- Italian Industrial Association meets Open Source
Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.
- FR: Defence ministry to test open source office tools
France’s ministry of Defence will next year test open source office productivity tools, according to answers given by the ministry to written questions by Bernard Carayon, a member of France’s parliament, about a framework contract with a proprietary software vendor.
The ministry on 1 June replied it will in 2011 start testing a software architecture including office tools based on open source software. This will be used parallel to the current proprietary tools. The results of the test will be used to decide on the future IT plans, writes the ministry. “The strategy is to have two or three different solutions available, to avoid vendor dependence, strengthen our bargaining position with suppliers and to have a proven alternative ready.”
French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) MP Carayon asked the ministry in Aprilto explain its new framework contract with Microsoft Ireland. Carayon fears that as a consequence of this contract, the ministry will stop all research into alternatives to the proprietary vendor’s software.
- Technology Rivals Lobby to Break Microsoft’s Hold
A European plan to advise governments on software purchases has set off a lobbying battle this summer between the U.S. software giant Microsoft and its rivals Google, I.B.M., Red Hat and Oracle over a set of guidelines that could redefine the competitive landscape for proprietary and open-source software.
The focus is a document called the European Interoperability Framework, a recommendation by the European Commission that national, provincial and local governments in the 27-nation European Union will consult when buying software. Open-source software advocates including Google, International Business Machine, Oracle and Red Hat, through a lobbying group, are pushing for a strong endorsement of open-source platforms in the document.
- EC To Provide Government Software Buying Guidelines
The Commission’s European Interoperability Framework guidelines are expected to provide help to national, local and provincial governments on the best software required to upgrade their systems.
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Licensing
- At Least Motorola Admits It
I’ve written before about the software freedom issues inherent with Android/Linux. Summarized shortly: the software freedom community is fortunate that Google released so much code under Free Software licenses, but since most of the code in the system is Apache-2.0 licensed, we’re going to see a lot of proprietarized, non-user-upgradable versions. In fact, there’s no Android/Linux system that’s fully Free Software yet. (That’s why Aaron Williamson and I try to keep the Replicant project going. We’ve focused on the HTC Dream and the NexusOne, since they are the mobile devices closest to working with only Free Software installed, and because they allow the users to put their own firmware on the device.)
- Western Digital to fix Licensing?
Over the last few months months I’ve been corresponding with Dennis Ulrich of Western Digital (WDC) about my concerns with the EULA for the My Book World Edition (MBWE) and their obligations under the GPL. To say it has been a drawn out process is an understatement.
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Openness/Sharing
- Seeking a New Round of Amazing Stories
It’s me again, asking you, my dedicated readers (Hi Mom) to help paint this really cool white fence. This is for a presentation my friend and colleague John Ittelson asked me to assist with (I bet more of you know John than me, but ask me sometime to tell the story of the lunch we never had in Albuquerque).
Anyhow, John is doing a session July 28 in San Jose for the Adobe Education Leaders, and he asked about doing a reprise of the Amazing Stories of Openness gig I did last year at the Open Education Conference.
- The BookLiberator.
The BookLiberator is an affordable personal book digitizer. We’ve just finalized the hardware design and are now proceeding to manufacturing. We want to have them for sale at our online store as soon as possible; we’re aiming for a price of appx $120 for the kit plus around $200 for the pair of cameras (many customers will already have consumer-grade digital cameras, so we’ll offer the BookLiberator with and without).
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Open Data
- Should the Open Source Initiative adopt the Open Knowledge Definition?
Russ Nelson, License Approval Chair at the Open Source Initiative (OSI), recently proposed a session at OSCON about OSI adopting a definition for open data:
I’m running a BOF at OSCON on Wednesday night July 21st at 7PM, with the declared purpose of adopting an Open Source Definition for Open Data. Safe enough to say that the OSD has been quite successful in laying out a set of criteria for what is, and what is not, Open Source. We should adopt a definition Open Data, even if it means merely endorsing an existing one. Will you join me there?
- Briefing paper on “The Semantic Web, Linked and Open Data”
The Semantic Web, open data, linked data. These phrases are becoming increasingly commonly used in terms of web developments and information architectures. But what do they really mean? Are they, can they be, relevant to education?
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Open Access/Content
- The intranet is dead. Long live the intranet.
Prince was wrong – it’s not the internet that’s dead, it’s the intranet. When I talk to clients about intranets as a collaboration hub they cock an eyebrow as if I’m speaking 2003 speak rather than 2010 speak. Some of it may be terminology tedium, but the sentiment is born out of a sense that the intranets of old no longer offer a compelling enough business proposition.
- Free Access to the Sum of all Human Tarkovsky
I love this because it really goes beyond just entries in Wikipedia; it’s about making everything that *can* be made universally available – non-rivalrous, digital content, in other words – freely accessible for all.
It’s one of the key reasons why I think copyright (and patents) need to go: they are predicated on stopping this happening – of *not* sharing what can be shared so easily.
[...]
Update: oh, what a surprise: some of the films have *already* disappeared because of “copyright issues”. Because copyright is so much more important than letting everyone enjoy an artist’s work. (Via Open Education News.)
- CERN supports Creative Commons
Creative Commons is deeply honored to announce CERN corporate support at the “creator level”. CERN is one of the world’s premier scientific institutions–home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web. This donation comes on the occasion of the publication under Creative Commons licenses of the first results of LHC experiments.
- Declaration of Open Government
The central recommendation of the Government 2.0 Taskforce’s report was that the Australian Government makes a declaration of open government. As the Minister responsible for that Taskforce, I am proud to make that Declaration today on behalf of the Australian Government.
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Open Hardware
- TI vs. Calculator Hobbyists, Again
- The Real Open Source Hardware Revolution
I recently wrote about the latest iteration of the Open Source Hardware Definition, which provides a framework for crafting open hardware licences. It’s a necessary and important step on the road towards creating a vibrant open source hardware movement. But the kind of open hardware that is commonly being made today – things like the hugely-popular Arduino – is only the beginning.
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Standards/Consortia
- German Federal CIO sides with Open Standards for public sector
Minister of state Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, IT Commissioner of the German government, said in an interview with the newspaper C’t (C’t 2010 Heft 15, S. 150-51) that “only by using Open Standards can [the government] obtain independence from software development companies”. He also recognised that “maximal interoperability can be reached with open IT-Standards”.
For Rogall-Grothe a valid technological standard must first be fully publicized, secondly be unrescritively and consistently used, and thirdly not be subjected to any legal restrictions. “The German government has clearly stated that a technical standard will only be recognised if it can be implemented by all organisations, including Free Software companies and developers”, says Matthias Kirschner, German Coordinator at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
- [ODF Plugfest] Brussels – 14 and 15 October 2010
This international plugfest is jointly organized by the Federal State, the Regions and Communities of Belgium. The event will be held in Brussels on the 14th and 15th of October 2010. The conference room in the “Boudewijn”-building – kindly provided by the Flemish Government – is conveniently located near the Brussels-North railway station.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, News Roundup at 2:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Motorola takes predatory approach; the Linux-based Android expands
Android
- Droid X actually self-destructs if you try to mod it
Well, I might have recommended a Droid X for big-phone-lovin’ fandroids out there… but now that I’ve read about Motorola’s insane eFuse tampering-countermeasure system, I’m going to have to give this one a big fat DON’T BUY on principle. I won’t restate all my reasons for supporting the modding, hacking, jailbreaking, and so on of your legally-owned products here — if you’re interested in a user’s manifesto, read this — but suffice it to say that deliberately bricking a phone if the user fiddles with it does not fall under the “reasonable” category of precautions taken by manufacturers.
- Droid X sells out as Motorola defends lock-down chip
The Motorola Droid X sold out in its first day, and won’t be available at Verizon Wireless until July 23, says eWEEK. Meanwhile, Motorola responded to complaints over the Droid X’s eFuse ROM lock-down chip, reassuring potential buyers that it won’t destroy the phone if ROM modifications are made.
- Google: Android Cost “Isn’t Material” For the Company — Android Search Up 300% In 2010
During Google’s Q2 2010 earnings call today, one of the things Google’s executives were clearly very excited about was the Android platform. They noted that there are now 70,000 apps in the Android Market — up from 30,000 in April. They also reiterated the company line about how important openness is to the platform. But during the Q&A session, an interesting question was raised: how much investment is Google putting into Android for this open platform?
- Android Poised For Dominance In China, With Global Implications
Android seems ready to leapfrog competitors to grab dominance in China, the world’s largest mobile market. A combination of drastic price drops on Android phones and custom Chinese mobile apps supported by the massive domestic market is bound to push Android past the entrenched leaders, setting the tone for how the mobile internet is built and interacted with around the world.
- Sony Ericsson Posts Profitable Q2 Thanks to Android
- Google Android gets open source PHP tools
Developers at an open source company in Spain are leading an effort to boost PHP application development for Android-based phones. Called PHP for Android (PFA), the project supports Google’s Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) project, formerly called Android Scripting Environment (ASE).
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Tablets
- HP Files For “Palmpad” Trademark
We knew that HP was going to get their money’s worth from Palm when they nixed their Android plans and downplayed their Windows 7 tablet. While reports still have them making the latter in at least some form (likely for enterprise), statements from HP and Palm indicate that webOS is going to be the focus for HP’s portable computer business.
- Hands on with an £85 Android Tablet Computer
Today (Sunday 18th July) Techcrunch published a story about how the Android operating system, which is now spreading beyond the mobile phone, is poised to take over China and said this will have global implications. Coincidentally yesterday I took delivery of a device, made in China, that is maybe not too well known: the Eken M001 Android Tablet. This gives you a WiFi enabled Android computer with a seven inch touchscreen that has 128MB of RAM, 2GB of storage and an SD card slot. None of these specifications are particularly remarkable, but what is astonishing was the price: £85 (about US $130) from a reseller on Amazon. Even a 7” digital photo frame would typically set you back £30! (about US $46)
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