04.01.13
Posted in News Roundup at 7:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
DNA Is The Linux Of The Natural WorldWe probably all vaguely assume that computers will overthrow us someday, which may be why it’s so unsettling to learn that computer code is evolving much like genetic code. By comparing bacterial genomes to Linux, researchers have found “survival of the fittest” acting in computer programming.
-
My photographer, Steve, squints through a computerized scope squatting atop a big hunting rifle. We’re outdoors at a range just north of Austin, Texas, and the wind is blowing like crazy—enough so that we’re having to dial in more and more wind adjustment on the rifle’s computer. The spotter and I monitor Steve’s sight through an iPad linked to the rifle via Wi-Fi, and we can see exactly what he’s seeing through the scope. Steve lines up on his target downrange—a gently swinging metal plate with a fluorescent orange circle painted at its center—and depresses a button to illuminate it with the rifle’s laser.
-
Katherine Noyes over on the Linux Advocates site has resurrected the GNU/Linux vs Linux naming debate, once again. To the uninitiated, the debate centers around if we should refer to the operating system as “GNU-slash-Linux” or simply as “Linux”, with the Free Software Foundation claiming that referring to the operating system merely as Linux gives undue credit to the kernel, without proper attribution to the GNU tools that make up the majority of the OS. Personally, I find the debate to be a waste of time. It is unlikely that anyone outside of a very small group of dedicated loyalists will care about the distinction. However, it does bring up a more interesting point, what about going a layer higher? What happens when distributions stop referring to themselves as Linux derivatives, come to market only under their name?
-
Desktop
-
I have been using a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook since picking it up last year. The Samsung is a great laptop that happens to run Chrome OS, something that works very well for me. I like everything about the Samsung. Then Google sent me a Chromebook Pixel and spoiled me.
The Series 5 550 Chromebook works very well for me. It runs Chrome OS nicely and is a super work machine that meets my needs. There is not really anything I don’t like about the Samsung, but it’s no longer enough.
-
Kernel Space
-
Graphics Stack
-
Earlier this morning I wrote about Chris Forbes committing texture storage multi-sample support to mainline Mesa and the Intel DRI driver. This OpenGL 4.x extension is now accompanied by a new “RFC” patch-set for providing Mesa support for another GL4 feature.
Chris Forbes’ newly-published patches on Sunday morning are for ARB_texture_gather, a feature mandated by OpenGL 4.0 and previously not tackled within the Mesa/Gallium3D world.
-
Open-source Intel developers have advanced their OpenGL geometry shaders work for Mesa, namely for the Intel DRI driver, and call it “substantial progress and definitely a reason to celebrate.” This important GL3 feature is nearing a working state but there’s still some work ahead before it will be merged.
-
Beyond LLVM 3.3 having performance optimizations, one of many other features coming to this next compiler infrastructure update is greater support for Intel’s AVX2 instruction set extensions.
AVX2 is the first major update to the Advanced Vector Extensions. AVX2 is also known as “Haswell New Instructions” and will be found in the Intel Haswell CPUs introduced in the coming months. AVX2 tacks in gather support, expands most integer AVX instructions to 256-bits, 3-operand FMA support, vector shifts, and other new functionality.
-
Support for the OpenGL ARB_texture_storage_multisample extension is now implemented within Mesa and is exposed by the Intel DRI driver.
-
Benchmarks
-
For those wondering whether Intel “Ivy Bridge” hardware is still being made faster with each succeeding Linux kernel release, here are benchmarks from an Intel Ultrabook looking at the Ivy Bridge performance on recent kernel releases going up to the yet-to-be-out Linux 3.9 kernel.
A few days back I carried out a Linux kernel performance comparison from an ASUS Ultrabook with Intel Core i3 3217U “Ivy Bridge” processor with 4GB of RAM, 500GB Hitachi HDD, and 24GB SanDisk SSD. Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64 was in use while the Linux 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 (Git) mainline/vanilla kernels were tested.
-
Applications
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine or Emulation
-
The Wine development release 1.5.27 is now available.
-
Games
-
All the talk nowadays if of “unification” or to paraphrase Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu the “availability of a single interface for all devices.” And with all this talk I began to wonder why more gaming engine’s aren’t jumping on board.
The recent release of Unity3d 4 was all the rage because it meant that an incredibly popular engine was coming to Linux, and thus all unity3d games developed with the new engine could in fact run on Linux (granted a Linux version was released). In my personal opinion, Unity3d is great, but when compared to the more AAA engines like the Unreal, FrostBite and CDProjectRed’s RED Engine just to name a few, Unity3d falls a bit flat in my eyes.
-
That’s right, you heard it here first folks, Half-Life 4 has been added to the SteamDB! It includes hints of others things too.
-
-
-
Serious Sam 3: BFE is a very serious first-person shooter, as the name suggests, and it has just received a major update that greatly improves its performance.
The Croteam studio has been hard at work and it is trying its best to make Serious Sam 3: BFE one of the best shooters for Linux.
The latest update for the game has been promoted from the Beta to stable. It’s probably one of the largest patches launched so far and the number of Linux related fixes and improvements is quite impressive.
-
They have also just launched their Mobile Bundles which are for Android only, so no Windows, Mac or Linux (I know, I know Android is part Linux that’s an argument for another day) versions, which makes me wonder just how the Windows crowd feels since they have been left out this time, too.
-
March 2013 was another interesting month for Linux users. The Mir Display Server, ARM on Linux advancements, and Valve’s continued Linux game play continued to excite readers.
This month on Phoronix at the time of publishing there were 242 original news articles and 11 multi-page featured articles. The number of news postings and articles is down from February when there was FOSDEM plus advertising campaigns on the site were more lucrative… Phoronix.com is almost entirely ad-driven so please view this site without AdBlock or other cruft. And/or please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing as well as viewing multi-page articles on a single-page.
-
Valve has added Half-Life 4 to Steam and it will be a title for Linux without mentioning OS X or Windows support.
As can be seen from SteamDB, Half-Life 4 was added today to Steam, well ahead of the Half-Life 3 debut. The Half-Life 4 entry also hints at binary support for the Steam Box, Valve’s forthcoming console. The Half-Life 4 entry also notes use of “Source Engine 2″ for the game.
-
-
For those that have followed Phoronix over the years know that I am a big supporter of the Unigine game/3D engine. The engine delivers absolutely beautiful graphics and there is first-rate Linux support. The developers at Unigine Corp are very Linux-friendly. Unfortunately, games and other software based upon Unigine aren’t too quick to come to the Linux gaming scene.
-
Today marks one year since an important milestone in the public history of Valve’s Steam client and Source Engine coming to Linux.
-
-
New Releases
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
After all the delays in our Mageia 3 planning, we’re very pleased to be able to announce the beta 4 release.
-
-
Red Hat Family
-
Despite the growth of Linux adoption in enterprise and business use, Red Hat, the large company that sells Linux operating-system software fell after reporting fiscal fourth-quarter sales that missed estimates as some customers stopped purchasing, due to the current global economic situation.
-
Fedora
-
Fedora 19 will be one of the first desktop Linux distributions shipping with accelerated Radeon HD 7000 series graphics support.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
It’s been decided at the last minute that “smart scopes”, a feature of the new Unity desktop, will not ship in Ubuntu 13.04.
Smart Scopes were supposed to be an intelligent server-side service for deciding if a search query should be pushed through a particular scope, among other benefits. Smart scopes were said to be self-learning and aimed to provide more relevant results for users of the Unity desktop.
-
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has finally listened to critics and EFF and said that the much controversial online search feature of Dash will be disabled by default in Ubuntu 13.04, which will be released later this month. Canonical was working closely with EFF, FSF and the EU privacy advisors and found it in best interest of its users.
“Users are our #1 priority and not our business interests,” said Shuttleworth in a statement, “the foundation of Ubuntu is people and if some decisions were made which put user’s privacy at risk, that would be very un-Ubuntu. We never shied away from trying out new things and we never hesitated in changing a decision for a greater good.”
-
-
Every day we walk past and interact with machines that run Linux, without ever noticing.
-
-
-
‘Zeitgeist‘ is a computer based user activity logging framework for the GNU/Linux operating system that keeps a track of your frequently opened files (text, audio, videos etc), visited web links, conversations that you had with others (through ‘Chat’ apps) etc.
The database is a semantic one and so it makes it easy to identify patters, thus improves the ability to predict user activities. And since this database can be accessed by other applications (if they support ‘Zeitgeist’), they can predict or guess the user’s needs more accurately and thus improving the user experience.
-
While the future is with Mir and Unity Next, work on the short-term includes more performance optimizations for the Unity desktop and Compiz window manager.
While Sam Spilsbury no longer works at Canonical and has some dissenting views over the future direction of Ubuntu Linux, he has dabbled with some performance optimizations recently for Compiz/Nux.
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
To protect the naked Raspberry Pi and cool it when overclocked, SweetBox is a great choice for you. SweetBox is a product by Graspinghand, a group of young designers from France. And the group is having a campaign on Kickstarter to raise fund for the project.
-
Phones
-
Ballnux
-
-
A cryptic media invite to see the social network’s “Home on Android” gets the rumor mill running anew about an upcoming Facebook phone.
-
Android
-
Facebook is moving to take a more prominent place on smartphones.
The social network has been developing new software for mobile devices powered by Google’s Android operating system that displays content from users’ Facebook accounts on a smartphone’s home screen–the first screen visible when they turn on the device, people familiar with the situation said. Facebook will initially demonstrate the capability on smartphones from HTC, these people said, but has been working to reach similar arrangements with other device makers.
-
-
Don’t want to give your money to Apple in exchange for an iPad or iPad mini? No problem! Here are my top 5 Android tablets for April 2013.
-
I have been a self-employed technical person for the past 38 years. I my living based solely on my output. Since 1998 a major secret weapon has been the use of SR. Certainly, you can get speech recognition from the Debian pool. While some good folks over in Japan have made some major advancements over the years, it is still a toy. This is inherent in the complexity of speech recognition software.
In 1998 IBM had a Linux version of SR known as ViaVoice. It worked about as well as any other SR offering of the day. IBM dropped the product. At a conference I asked an IBM executive, Why? The answer was: “We did not get enough gross revenue to cover the cost of the box manufacturing to put the CD in it.”
In my experience the Open Source community is its own worst enemy. Putting on the rose-colored glasses, and disappointing those who just want to ‘get something done’. Let’s look at a real world example.
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Mozilla
-
The software firm has teamed up with Epic Games to bolster the browser’s gaming capabilities and bring some of the latest titles to the platform.
-
Funding
-
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given 3 million dollars to Texas-based software provider Continuum Analytics with a view to helping fund the improvement of the Python language’s data processing and visualization power for big data tasks.
-
BSD
-
The DragonFlyBSD 3.4 release is anticipated for release in mid-April and one of the features to this next BSD operating system update is the formation of DPorts, a derivative of the FreeBSD ports collection.
DPorts is DragonFly’s derivative of FreeBSD Ports and will ultimately replace pkgsrc and the other pkg_* tools on the operating system. These older tools also reached an end-of-life state on FreeBSD.
-
Project Releases
-
Licensing
-
The Russian government in recent weeks has been making use of a new law that gives it the power to block Internet content that it deems illegal or harmful to children.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
That’s perhaps why it wasn’t all that surprising that Ford’s EVP of Global Marketing, James Farley, didn’t use his keynote address at the opening day of the New York International Auto Show to announce some line extension or new braking system, but rather to introduce a mobile app competition.
-
OAKLAND, CA—Four years ago, Code For America (CFA) was founded with the mission to “help governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the Web.” Within two years, the San Francisco-based nonprofit set up a fellowship program, inviting American cities to receive a team of three young motivated developers, activists, and policy planners. The Washington Post’s description captured what everyone was already thinking: CFA is the “technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps or Teach for America.”
-
Open Access/Content
-
In a dramatic show of support for the open access movement, the editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week. In a letter to contributors, the board singled out a conflict with owners over the journal’s licensing terms, which stripped authors of almost all claim to ownership of their work.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
WebRTC is awesome, but it’s a bit unapproachable. Last week, my colleagues and I at &yet released a couple of tools we hope will help make it more tinkerable and pose a real risk of actually being useful.
-
To watch the accelerating fall from grace of the once venerable Washington Post is perhaps to view traditional journalism’s quandary in a nutshell.
First, their ombudsman suggested it was unlikely that the Post would implement a paywall, for a variety of sound reasons.
Then the Post fired their ombudsman. Then they announced the availability of notorious “sponsored posts” throughout their pages.
And it’s been ever more rapidly downhill for the Post from there, with their now giving credence to serial Google hater Robert Epstein’s rambli
-
-
The basic design of modern word processors has its roots in the WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) revolution of the 1980s, which became possible with the introduction of the graphical user interface. Whereas people once had to use a text editor to enter markup by hand, and never really knew what their document was going to look like to readers until they printed it, WYSIWYG provided an accurate on-screen depiction of how the final print output would appear.
-
Somewhere Steve Jobs isn’t smiling. Computer pioneer Alan Kay, a former Apple Fellow back in the ’80s, had some harsh things to say about the iPad and tablets in general tonight at a Silicon Valley event.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Under the Coalition’s reforms, the NHS’s former strengths are being replaced by a fragmented service, bound not by what is best for the patient but by cost
-
Security
-
Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
-
As two more Afghan children are liberated (from their lives) by NATO this weekend, a new film examines the effects of endless US aggression
-
A bill introduced in the North Carolina General Assembly will practically ground all future drone use in the state if it is not rewritten. The bill proposes to “regulate the use of drones to conduct searches” and is already being praised by the ACLU of North Carolina as an “opportunity to place strong safeguards and regulations on the use of drones . . . .” The bill, however, doesn’t regulate the use of drones so much as it buries their operation in ambiguities and contradictory constraints.
-
Boeing, the aircraft manufacturing giant from Seattle, helped defeat a Republican proposal in Washington state that would have forced government agencies to get approval to buy unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as drones, and to obtain a warrant before using them to conduct surveillance on individuals.
-
Brennan had masterminded the program, from creating the bureaucratic processes determining which agency did what, right down to naming names for the kill list. In his new job, Brennan would have enormous sway over the CIA’s future activities, including lethal drone strikes.
[...]
But if the drone debate is any guide, the public part counts. A lot.
-
Cablegate
-
-
WikiLeaks has announced a press conference scheduled for April 8, generating speculation about a possible release of a new stash of classified material or a project somehow connected to Assange’s political party in Australia.
-
THE bare-knuckle infighting within Zanu PF has reached new heights, with WikiLeaks being resuscitated as party members try to discredit each other ahead of the party’s primary elections expected next month.
-
-
-
It is now official. WikiLeaks announced on Twitter on Saturday that Julian Assange’s new Australian political party is open for membership.
Digital Journal reported back in January 2013 that Assange is planning to run for the Australian Senate in September this year and that he was founding the new WikiLeaks party.
However, in order to officially register with the Australian Electoral Commission, the WikiLeaks Party must enlist 500 members.
-
The Ecuadorian government has held talks with the British Labour party to try to strike a deal to send Assange to Sweden to end the political impasse, which has seen the Australian whistleblower holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy since claiming asylum in June last year.
-
LONDON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London since last June, is unlikely to be able to leave Britain before 2015 and his hosts are now hoping for a future Labour government to help break the impasse, a media report said.
-
-
Information warfare is the 21st Century equivalent of class warfare, with people like Aaron Swartz (threatened with decades of imprisonment, then bullied by prosecutors into taking his own life), Barrett Brown (imprisoned, awaiting trial and threatened with life imprisonment), Jeremy Hammond (same), Julian Assange (under investigation by Grand Jury) and Bradley Manning (facing life sentence in upcoming trial) as its most notable victims whom the US Government has decided to make an example of so as to deter others from following suit.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Chinese authorities have a new mystery to ponder after 1,000 duck carcases were found floating down the Nanhe river in the country’s Sichuan province on Tuesday.
-
Finance
-
The nation’s largest banks have devised a novel way to protect their interests and save themselves from hundreds of billions of dollars in legal exposure. They’re taking a judge to court.
-
Lawyers for 17 banks submitted an unusual filing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this week (just listing all the corporate lawyers involved takes up the first four pages). The banks – including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley – stand accused of ripping off the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie and Freddie’s conservator, alleges that these banks improperly sold $200 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities without disclosing the shoddy underwriting of the underlying loans. FHFA argues the banks knew the loans in the securities were bad, yet sold them to Fannie and Freddie anyway, leading to massive losses and the need for a government bailout. So FHFA wants the banks to buy back the securities they improperly sold under false pretenses.
-
A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisors as and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war’s total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.
-
First, its clear that profits as a percentage of total US GDP have recovered from the crash of 2008. Unemployment may still be over 50% higher than it was in 2007, and real wages may be below what they were then, and the benefits and security of jobs may have fallen, but profits have come back. And with them the stock markets. Hence also the upbeat talk about “recovery” yet again.
-
Yesterday, news broke that the Expensify service has enabled bitcoin payments. With the rapidly expanding number of businesses accepting bitcoin as payment method, one could think that this was merely another player in the pool of bitcoin’s expanding economy (which just broke the one-billion-USD barrier, by the way). But Expensify is something much more than that.
-
A previous article called them the new normal. Bad ideas spread fast. Canada endorses Cypriot harshness. Its “Jobs Growth and Long-Term Prosperity: Economic Action Plan 2013″ says so.
-
Civil Rights
-
The Lords often make very helpful contributions to legislative debates, but this really isn’t one of them. There are huge amounts of regulation constraining Internet providers, from eCommerce to copyright, that cover the necessary ground already.
-
-
-
In fact, last summer U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest granted a permanent injunction, ruling detention provisions written into the NDAA overbroad and unconstitutional.
-
The issue came to light yesterday when Minnesotans United for All Families, which is pushing to legalize same-sex marriage, criticized the group for linking same-sex marriage efforts to propaganda in Nazi Germany. The initial language was posted on the website Pastors for Marriage, which is working with Minnesota for Marriage to ban same-sex marriage. The website (which has been changed since the controversy surfaced on Thursday) included a message from Minnesota for Marriage Chair John Helmberger (who is also CEO of the Minnesota Family Council).
-
-
Two former CIA employees whose suburban Kansas City home was unsuccessfully searched for marijuana claim they were illegally targeted, possibly because they had purchased indoor growing supplies to raise vegetables.
-
-
-
Intellectual Monopolies
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.31.13
Posted in Patents, Red Hat at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Rackspace helps beat software patents, with additional help from Red Hat
THE EFF is happy with the outcome of a trial that Dietrich Schmitz covered on Friday. “Luckily for the defendant,” he said, “the judge ruled early on before the case got under way and was saved a substantial sum in litigation fees for fighting a frivolous lawsuit.” But the main point here, patents got thrown out for being reducible to math, just like all software patents. This is major.
Here is an article about the decision:
Today was a big day in patent law, which is important to anyone who thinks they might one day have an original idea for a product, and wants to protect it. In particular, if that idea involves an algorithm or software.
First, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas threw out a claim against cloud storage company Rackspace, stemming from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA. The case, according to a TechCrunch report, asserted that the “processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation.” In other words, a processing method, or counting method, might be the exclusive property of Uniloc.
Here is other good coverage and some from the SFLC:
Several times in recent years, opponents of software patents have looked hopefully to Congress and the Supreme Court for a solution to the expensive problem of software patents, and several times we’ve been disappointed. The narrow Bilski v. Kappos ruling invalidated one business method patent but left the question of software patents to one side, and even arguably weakened a rule—the “machine-or-transformation” test—intended to limit the scope of patentability. The reforms of the America Invents Act were half-hearted; they provided additional opportunities to challenge patents at the USPTO, but did not fundamentally affect the rules for patenting software.
Despite these missed opportunities, there are signs of slower but consistent reform in the courts, and yesterday’s ruling in the Eastern District of Texas in Uniloc v. Rackspace is one of them. The Uniloc ruling is about as good as it gets for a defendant in a software patent case: the judge dismissed the case at an early stage on the grounds that the claim at issue described an unpatentable mathematical formula.
LWN wrote about this and Mark Webbink, formerly of Red Hat, covered this in Groklaw. Many correctly call Uniloc a patent troll, including this headline:
A patent troll that accused Rackspace of violating a patent merely by selling Linux-based servers has seen its case thrown out. A judge ruled the patent claim invalid because it describes a relatively simple math operation.
The company in question is Uniloc, which has a long history of suing tech vendors. In 2009, a US District Court judge overturned a $388 million verdict Uniloc had won against Microsoft. That litigation was finally settled late last year for an undisclosed sum. Uniloc continues litigating however, with at least a dozen lawsuits filed just last week.
Uniloc sued Rackspace in June 2012 in US District Court in Eastern Texas (PDF), claiming Rackspace violated its patent “by or through making, using, offering for sale, selling and/or importing servers running Linux Kernel (version 2.6 or higher), which is used to process floating point operations carried out on Rackspace’s servers including those servers used in conjunction with Rackspace’s hosting solutions/products.”
The fight of Rackspace against patent troll Uniloc is not Rackspace’s only battle against software patents, as was covered here before. Here is the press release about the outcome:
Plaintiff Uniloc USA, Inc. is a frequent litigator, having brought patent lawsuits against many high-tech companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Sony and Symantec. Rackspace provides its customers with managed servers running the Linux operating system. Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense as part of Red Hat’s commitment to standing behind customers through Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance program.
Here’s more:
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE: RAX) announced that they have won a federal court decision granting early dismissal of all claims in a lawsuit brought by the patent assertion entity Uniloc USA, Inc.
Plaintiff Uniloc USA, Inc. is a frequent litigator, having brought patent lawsuits against many high-tech companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Sony and Symantec. Rackspace provides its customers with managed servers running the Linux operating system. Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense as part of Red Hat’s commitment to standing behind customers through Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance program.
The press release calls Uniloc plaintiff rather than troll. How polite. “Uniloc USA, Inc.” is not a company, this is a façade. Here is a good article from a FOSS news site:
Red Hat and Rackspace have won the court battle with patent troll Uniloc USA, Inc. The company alleged in its complaint that the processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system violated U.S. Patent 5,892,697. A federal court decision had granted an early dismissal of all claims in a lawsuit brought by Uniloc USA, Inc.
This bit of news got heaps of coverage (here is some in German), probably more than coverage of Red Hat’s financial results. Let’s hope this case has maximal impact on US law. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Google, Marketing, Microsoft at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Two companies, two entirely different stories and strategies
Summary: PR moves from a patent aggressor and a notable patent victim which might be preparing for reactive lawsuits
A huge number of sites covered the news from Google, with the notion of ‘free’ software patents. How silly is that? Well, as put better by another site, “Google’s Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge: Don’t start nothin’, there won’t be nothin’.”
Microsoft, conversely, as a form of threat and PR did this:
Microsoft today launched a searchable list of its complete patent portfolio as part of its defense of the patent system, particularly software patents.
Now that mobile patents are extensively used in litigation and a quarter of issued patents are on mobile (Microsoft still aggressively patents mobile ideas), we expect this list to be used for extortion more than anything. It’s like an arsenal of nuclear weapons to be used to strike patent deals.
The newspeak of extortion as “transparency” is laughable. Watch the longtime Microsoft booster helping the PR by using this “transparency” buzzword in his headline:
Microsoft this morning published a searchable online list of its patent holdings — more than 40,000 patents held by the company and its subsidiaries in the U.S. and internationally — as part of its push for more transparency in the patent system.
What a load of nonsense. It is just hogwash.
Is Microsoft trying to steal Google’s thunder after Google followed the footsteps of Twitter, as we had urged it to do last year? The headline above is not an accurate headline, it is marketing. Here is another poor headline about the real news:
Google announced a “patent pledge” in which it will donate 10 patents related to MapReduce to protect the emerging cloud and big data industry from lawsuits.
The Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge is better than no pledge but not better than no patents. Here is more about it:
Google just announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge, a new initiative whereby the company has promised not to sue developers, distributors, and users of open source software utilizing Mountain View’s patents “unless first attacked.” In introducing the good faith effort, Google is reiterating its passion and support for all things open. “Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally,” writes Duane Valz, Google’s senior patent counsel. “We remain committed to an open Internet — one that protects real innovation and continues to deliver great products and services.”
The company isn’t throwing its entire patent portfolio up for grabs, however. Quite the opposite: it’s starting small, contributing a mere ten patents to the pledge. Google claims these patents are already in wide use and that it will eventually expand the set of Google-owned patents that fall under the pledge.
The original announcement generated press not only in FOSS sites but also large news sites [1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23]. The smart folks at TechDirt correctly point out that this might be a prelude to patent lawsuits from Google (preparation and damage control in expectation of negative press), as outlined here. One of our readers asked, “OIN all over again?”
Here is one of the most cited articles about it. it’s from Wired:
Behind the scenes, just about all of the web’s biggest names are mimicking Google. That includes Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and so many more.
All of these web giants rely on Hadoop, an open source software platform for crunching data across hundreds or even thousands of computer servers, and Hadoop is based on technology originally developed at Google. A little less than a decade ago, Google published two research papers describing some of the software that juggles data inside its data centers, including a platform called MapReduce, and in short order, a community of software developers — led by Facebook and Yahoo — recreated these tools with open source code.
Expect Google to sue more, but only against companies that sued first. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
On Friday 24th of March, Pablo Rodriguez Pina, founder and co-director of the Perth (Western Australia) based software company announced the company will be InSync to sync Google Drive folders on PCs running any Linux distros.
-
Today, I read how the United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor, started a migration from Windows to Linux here. The article includes this interesting comment by Keith Chuvala:
“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could.”
-
On Linux Advocates, Katherine Noyes recently raised the old question of whether the operating system should be called Linux or GNU/Linux. It’s a topic I don’t think much about these days, although I’ve had some unusual perspectives on it over the years.
You probably know the argument: given that the operating system was originally the result of cooperation between Linux kernel developers and the members of The GNU Project, both should be given credit in the name. True, countless other projects are involved, but the reference is to the core operating system, and to mention one without the other is to write the excluded founding organization out of history. Or so free software supporters maintain, especially Richard Stallman, who has sometimes refused to be interviewed without a promise that GNU/Linux be used.
Over the years, I’ve flip-flopped on the point several times. When I was a product manager and marketing director, I favored “Linux” simply because it was shorter and less clumsy-looking than “GNU/Linux,” and therefore made for better copy.
However, as I became more involved in the community, I started having second thoughts. It wasn’t just that Stallman has a point — and Stallman, for all that he gets tiresome repeating the same ideas over and over, has an understanding of the implications of language that few of his critics can match.
Rather, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the projects I admired most, such as Debian, used “GNU/Linux”. The more I thought, the more I realized that I was a free software supporter, so using “GNU/Linux” seemed the logical thing for me to do. If nothing else, it immediately served notice about where I stood in relation to free software and open source. I was never pedantic about its use, and I never went around correcting anyone, either in person or indirectly as I transcribed an interview, but otherwise I always used “GNU/Linux” where I could.
-
As many of you know, part of my popularity analysis of GNU/Linux distributions includes search engine results. One thing I immediately noticed when I started analyzing the data was how fewer results Bing has compared to Google specifically for the term “Ubuntu Linux”. At first, I thought that perhaps Bing simply hasn’t indexed as much as Google and it will catch up. But over several ranking periods now, Bing is still, in my opinion, unusually low in “Ubuntu Linux” results.
-
For the last couple of years, I have been working on building a 5 meter radio telescope for educational purposes in my free time. Its primary purpose is to map neutral hydrogen distribution in the milky way. Hydrogen, the simplest atom, shines at the radio frequency of 1.42 Ghz (or 21 cm line), and we use multistage amplifiers to boost the very weak radio signal to something that can be processed by the electronics of a spectrometer.
-
Server
-
In the next five years 80 percent of organisations plan to increase Linux server use, but only 20 percent plan to purchase Windows servers
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
This is an episode completely in “Beginners Level”, some of you have asked for such a thing. I go through the editing of an image and cover a lot of topics. Nothing really in depth, but you should be able to work your way through other material after viewing this one.
-
-
-
Kernel Space
-
The maintainers of the native Linux port of the ZFS high-reliability filesystem have announced that the most recent release, version 0.6.1, is officially ready for production use.
“Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL [ZFS on Linux] is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers,” developer Brian Behlendorf wrote in a mailing list post on Wednesday.
-
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, March 28, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.8 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.8.5 comprised lots of updated drivers (USB, Ethernet, i915, Radeon, etc.), filesystem improvements (EXT4, CIFSfs, JBD2, etc.), a couple of ARM fixes for Tegra chips, as well as networking (IPv4 and IPv6) and sound enhancements.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Last week, Wayland/Weston was forked by a long-time contributor, Scott Moreau. The fork of the Wayland/Weston display server ended up becoming known as Northfield/Norwood, following disagreements within the Wayland development camp. Scott Moreau was ultimately banned from the Wayland mailing list and IRC channel, so he’s written an exclusive, independent article for Phoronix to explain his actions and why he felt a fork of the Wayland display server protocol and the reference Weston compositor were necessary.
-
Applications
-
-
I just mentioned asciiquarium yesterday, and I suppose it’s only fair to mention another fun text-based tool from the same author: weatherspect.
-
-
-
Some friends over at Scot’s Newsletter Forums – Bruno’s All Things Linux got me started playing with Conky the other night.
I used to be a Gkrellm fan until transparency failed to display properly a while back. I didn’t feel like messing around with feh and lib workarounds, so I just quit using it. Sad. It was a wonderful system monitor app, too.
-
-
-
-
Proprietary
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Beside being a linux fan, I’m also a long time amateur photographer, since the time of film and fully manual SLR, yes, I’m used to camera controls and manual focus….
-
Games
-
Starsector (originally Starfarer) is a space combat sim I have been following for a long time now, it is constantly evolving and becoming more awesome, it has everything a decent space combat sim needs…including a new trailer to show it off!
-
-
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Subsurface, the dive-tracking program written by none other than Linus Torvalds, is considering moving to Qt.
-
Wow, things got crazy with my two previous posts about KDE’s Git corruption troubles.
Unfortunately, what became obvious from the comments on this blog (and, I assume, elsewhere, although I didn’t read comments on any other sites) was that the essential message was, almost universally, completely lost. I wrote the original post because KDE is an open-source project and we’ve never been about hiding issues from the community at large, so I felt it was perfectly fair to be open and honest about the troubles we had, in the hopes that it could help other projects from encountering them. Rather than take something useful away from it, most people seemed to take the Gawker approach. That’s fine, and I take no offense from people shooting the messenger when it’s clear they didn’t actually read past the headlines, but the point was to make people – especially other open-source projects – think about their own systems and their procedures. If I helped one other project avoid data loss because they reexamined their own systems, then great.
-
Groupware is a tough domain to break into. With competition from giants the likes of Lotus Notes and Exchange, how can an open source offering, like Kolab, ever hope to compete?
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
Nautilus has undergone massive changes in recent versions and it is going to be a challenge figuring out a few things. The following long winded article would be useful in figuring out various “Hidden” functionalities of Nautilus. But before doing anything, do Configure Community Repositories openSUSE 12.3
-
-
GNOME 3 is not quite famous about the plethora of options that gives to users to tweaking their system. However anyone with a good will won’t face many issues.
In this part I spend a few minutes discovering the options for customizing the behavior of Tracker, the searching and indexing tool of GNOME.
-
Snappy is a media player that gathers the power and flexibility of GStreamer inside the comfort of a Clutter interface.
It has recently become a GNOME Project, with all the important points that that means (code, bugs, mailing lists inside the gnome project).
-
With GNOME 3.8, the developers of the GNOME Project have released the latest version of their open source desktop environment for Linux and Unix systems. The release brings a number of major new features, such as the new Clocks application, enhanced search functionality, new privacy settings and a number of design changes throughout the desktop environment. The redesign of the Activities and Applications interface is supposed to make finding the right application easier and the Settings application has gained four new configuration panels.
-
-
Nothing stirs more debate with fellow Linux enthusiasts than their package manager.
It’s a passionately contested issue. Which is better, YUM or APT?
You’ll be surprised at the answers and it’s really interesting to see what people think of each.
-
Kali Linux is only a collection of pentesting tools Linux distribution. All the pentesting tools can be obtained free of charge from the internet as those are freeware or open source software.
The development team of Kali Linux do not accept any voice from their users about their weakness of their product. For example, when telling them about the Kali Linux rebuild bugs, they always stating that they have built a lot of copies and they found no problem. Later, one of the developer fixed and it can be compiled correctly. You can refer to the following bug report for details.
-
-
-
New Releases
-
-
-
-
Pardus is a distribution developed at least in part by the Turkish military. It used to not be based on any other distribution and used its unique PISI package management system, which featured delta upgrades (meaning that only the differences between package versions would be applied for upgrades, greatly reducing their size). Since then, though, the organization largely responsible for the development of Pardus went through some troubles. One result was the forking of Pardus into PISI Linux to further develop the original alpha release of Pardus 2013. The other result was the rebasing of Pardus on Debian, abandoning PISI in that regard. Now Pardus 2013 is a distribution based on Debian 7 “Wheezy” that uses either KDE 4.8 or GNOME 3 (whatever version is packaged in the latest version of Debian, though I’m not sure what that is).
-
Red Hat Family
-
Debian Family
-
Ubuntu, Mint, and other glamorous Debian derivatives get all the attention. So why not go to the source and try Debian itself?
Debian is currently the most influential Linux distribution. It has inspired the popular derivatives Ubuntu and Knoppix, and their derivatives including Mint, Kubuntu, Dream Studio, Bodhi, Mepis, Damn Small Linux, and Mythbuntu. (See the Linux family tree on Wikipedia.) Debian is volunteer-driven, includes more packages than any other distribution, supports more hardware architectures, supports multiple kernels (Linux, FreeBSD, and GNU Hurd) and is 100% Free. It is also free of cost, and the good Debian people came up with a simple, elegant way to meet the needs of users who want to install non-Free software on their Debian systems. They put non-Free packages in separate repositories, so controlling what goes on your system is super easy.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
MapR has announced a deal with Canonical to offer Hadoop on the Ubuntu Linux platform.
Under the partnership agreement, the two firms will work in tandem to develop the MapR Hadoop tools for use with the latest versions of Ubuntu.
-
MapR and Canonical announced a partnership to put the MapR Hadoop distribution on Ubuntu. The company also put its source code on GitHub.
-
Earlier this week, Canonical and MapR teamed for an announcement that could signal a change in the way we see big data platforms.
The pair said that the latest versions of Ubuntu would be bringing support for MapR’s Hadoop database management and development platform. Now, Ubuntu users will be able to access data from Hadoop deployments.
-
As some of you may know the dash team has been working to get the new smart scopes functionality in the dash ready for 13.04; this functionality delivers a far more comprehensive dash experience, performing searches over 50 or more different data sources. This feature makes the dash dramatically more useful by searching a far wider range of data sources and returning more relevant results.
The team has been working in a PPA to get the feature ready, and as we are past feature freeze, had filed a Feature Freeze Exception (FFe) to get this into 13.04. After an extensive amount of work to get the feature ready, unfortunately the dash team doesn’t consider it mature enough for 13.04 — it is nearly there, but doesn’t meet the quality needs for Ubuntu. As such the team has decided not to pursue landing in in 13.04 and to instead move it to the Ubuntu 13.10 cycle where it will be developed as soon as the archive opens. As I mentioned earlier, this feature has been developed in a PPA and has not landed in 13.04 yet, so there are no actual changes to the archive.
-
-
-
-
Cogent Computer Systems has introduced a high-end member of its computer-on-module family, based on Marvell’s 1.6GHz quad-core, ARMv7-powered “Armada XP” system-on-chip. The SODIMM-style CSB1726 module packs high-speed SATA and Ethernet ports, PCIe expansion, video, and numerous other I/O ports, and is supported with an embedded Linux BSP.
-
-
-
Phones
-
The second annual Tizen Developer Conference will be held May 22-24 in San Francisco. The event targets Tizen OS and app developers, mobile operators, hardware designers, ISVs, and open source enthusiasts.
The goal of the conference, according to its organizers, is to bring together individuals and businesses who share the goal of developing Tizen as an open platform for use in a wide range of devices ranging from smartphones to in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.
-
Android
-
ITTIA is now supporting Android-based embedded systems and devices with its lightweight embedded database. ITTIA DB SQL for Android is said to provide advanced data management capabilities, including transactions, scalable indexing, shared access, and runtime SQL queries.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
The product, which I’ll be more than happy to buy, and the video are cool. And I like stuff with a high coolness factor. The company also makes a tablet called Parrot ASTEROID Tablet.
-
In 1998 Martin Roesch launched the open source Snort Intrustion Prevention System (IPS). Three years later, he founded Sourcefire to lead the commercial efforts around Snort and enterprise security. Today Sourcefire continues to prosper, reporting $223.1 million in fiscal 2012 earnings.
Where does that leave the open source Snort project after all these years?
-
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
Having recently introduced asm.js as a way of running C/C++ applications using a highly optimisable subset of JavaScript, Mozilla has joined Epic Games to present the technology being applied to a well-known platform at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco. A port of the Unreal Engine 3 game engine to JavaScript allows games to be played in the browser without a Flash plug-in. The port only uses HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript technologies, and asm.js ensures that the games are almost fast enough to meet the performance levels of native implementations.
-
Databases
-
For years, MySQL has been fundamental to many server applications, especially those using the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software stack. Those days may be ending. BothFedora (Red Hat’s community Linux) and openSUSE (SUSE’s community Linux) will be switching out MySQL to MariaDB for their default database management system (DBMS) in their next releases.And finally Archlinux is following the Opensource World. :
Bellow is Archlinux MalingList:
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Have you ever thought of migrating your company to an open source desktop productivity suite? You don’t switch just to save on license fees; think that way and the differences in the replacement package – which can never be a drop-in replacement – will kill your migration like they did Freiburg’s.
-
-
-
Project Releases
-
Licensing
-
So it was with interest that we came across this article by Simon Phipps, well known for his activities in the open source arena and his experience with open source licenses. Basically his argument revolved around the fact that most code in GitHub does not have a specific license. Moreover, there is a movement that believes “software licenses are outdated” and encourages code forking without considering the original end-result licensing aspects. Although GitHub is singled out here, the behavior is not unique to GitHub. Sourceforge has a good number of project pages with no license listing or just a mention of an “approved OSI License” against the project. Although, in all fairness, and according to our own Global IP Signatures database, GitHub is probably the biggest source of unlicensed projects.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
-
Open Access/Content
-
-
A large proportion of academic research in the UK is taxpayer-funded. The money comes either via grants from the Research Councils, on which the government spends approximately £3 billion each year, or directly to universities from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which in 2011-12 distributed £1.6 billion.
The transformative potential of world-class research is pretty clear. In the last few years alone, UK researchers have developed the wonder material graphene and discovered the body of Richard III, among other things. Yet, in a curious and inequitable twist of fate, the results of this research have for the most part never been made available to the taxpayers who funded it. Instead, research findings are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals run by private publishing companies. In the modern era, these largely take the form of PDFs behind pay-walls, tantalisingly close and yet inaccessible to those who aren’t willing to fork out $40 per view. Universities and libraries, meanwhile, can buy back-breakingly expensive subscriptions to this content. The net result of all this is that research findings are available only to the wealthy and to research institutions themselves, and even then only at great cost.
-
Science
-
Researchers at Stanford University announced this week that they’ve created genetic receptors that can act as a sort of “biological computer,” potentially revolutionizing how diseases are treated.
In a paper published in the journal “Science” on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
-
The government in China’s financial hub said 10,570 carcasses had been pulled from its Huangpu river. That is in addition to 5,528 pigs plucked from upstream tributaries in the Jiaxing area of Zhejiang province.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The storm shown here stretches west to east from Newfoundland to Portugal. Its southern tail (cold front) extends into the Caribbean and the north side of its comma head touches southern Greenland.
-
Honeybee deaths are on the rise across the world, and researchers are working to find the cause. With as many as 40 or 50 percent of commercial U.S. bee hives lost to colony collapse disorder, according to the New York Times, scientists are eyeing a relatively new class of pesticides as a likely culprit.
-
-
One day after a major oil spill Mayflower residents are demanding answers.
Hundreds of residents showed up at a press conference Saturday afternoon asking questions that local and Exxon officials struggled to answer.
Mayflower residents filled up the cafeteria seats at Mayflower High School hoping to get an explanation that never came. Dozens of homeowners are staying in with residents and local hotels waiting until the oil mess is cleaned up. The problem is that many were initially told that it would only take a couple of days. Saturday they heard at least a week.
-
Finance
-
Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un. The class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise. The far-reaching power of globalization, linking the most remote corners of the planet in lucrative bonds of finance, outsourcing and “borderless” manufacturing, offered everybody from Silicon Valley tech gurus to Chinese farm girls ample opportunities to get rich. Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. Capitalism appeared to be fulfilling its promise — to uplift everyone to new heights of wealth and welfare.
-
With banks opening on Cyprus, many entrepreneurs realized they had been wrecked overnight by their government’s dishonesty. The so-called bank bailout was in reality a death sentence for many small businesses, who saw their operating capital confiscated to save the government’s face. This move will create an inevitable uncertainty throughout the Eurozone: who will dare put their operating capital in a bank in a troubled country, when politicians keep saying everything is fine – until one day, the money is just gone?
-
The biggest problem currently facing the European Union (EU) is not the struggling economy of Cyprus but the “Grillo factor” in Italy, Jim O’Neill, president of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, told Bloomberg TV on Friday. “I don’t understand how some of the these tough guys in the north are not thinking about that issue,” said O’Neill in reference to the political ascent of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) led by Genoa comic Beppe Grillo, which took over 25% of the popular vote in recent general elections.
-
Bitcoin, the world’s first open source cryptographic currency, which has been on a tear since the beginning of this year, set a new record for itself yesterday afternoon as the price listed on the largest online exchange rose past US $92. With nearly 11 million Bitcoins in circulation*, this sets the total worth of the currency just over one billion dollars.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
-
A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: “It’s not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for news, but what you don’t print.”
He wasn’t talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The professionalism of the craft isn’t simply learning to write or broadcast what other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and challenge, and checking out stories you’ve discovered through your own curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.
-
Censorship
-
The risk of libel reform failing is not one that any Briton should find acceptable. The damage our libel laws have caused over the decades is immeasurable, and has only increased since the advent of the internet.
Now the vastly overdue libel measures that would bring the UK out of the 19th Century, and into at least the 20th Century, are on hold and may falter, due to the intervention of Lord Puttnam, and his inclusion of statutory regulation of the press in the bill.
Sure, there could now be a list of examples of Libel tourism, and how stupid it makes Britain look, internationally, but instead how about a real-life libel law situation, and how it restricted and hampered an attempt to participate in government?
-
Privacy
-
Timothy Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence, wrote a major feature story for The Nation this week on the four whistleblowers from the National Security Agency—William Binney, Thomas Drake, William Binney, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe—who Shorrock writes were “falsely accused of leaking in 2007″ and “have endured years of legal harassment for exposing the waste and fraud behind a multibillion-dollar contract for a system called Trailblazer, which was supposed to “revolutionize” the way the NSA produced signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the digital age.”
The program was “canceled in 2006.” It is now “one of the worst failures in US intelligence history.”Not only that, the failure is now a significant coverup in recent government history, as the Justice Department prosecuted Drake for blowing the whistle on this corruption and the total amount of money spent on privatizing this intelligence collection is still secret.
Moreover, there was this other cheaper program, ThinThread, that was not a privatization scheme. It had the ability to “analyze trillions of bits of foreign SIGINT flowing over the Internet at warp speed.” It was “small enough to be loaded onto a laptop, and included anonymization software that protected the privacy rights of US persons guaranteed in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).” But, ThinThread was not made generally operational so that Trailblazer wouldn’t have to be scrapped.
The story goes into much more detail on the ”toxic mix of bid-rigging, cronyism and fraud” of which “senior NSA officials and several of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors” were involved. Interviews with the “NSA Four” offer a glimpse at how the ”Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the government’s fourth-largest contractor, squandered billions of dollars on a vast data-mining scheme that never produced an iota of intelligence.” (Read the full story here.)
-
Civil Rights
-
In the last week, two Palestinians have been sentenced to prison terms for online libel and slander of politicians. Meanwhile, an arrest order has been issued for a popular Egyptian satirist, raising fears of a crackdown on freedom in the region.
-
One very common tactic for enforcing political orthodoxies is to malign the character, “style” and even mental health of those who challenge them. The most extreme version of this was an old Soviet favorite: to declare political dissidents mentally ill and put them in hospitals. In the US, those who take even the tiniest steps outside of political convention are instantly decreed “crazy”, as happened to the 2002 anti-war version of Howard Dean and the current iteration of Ron Paul (in most cases, what is actually “crazy” are the political orthodoxiesthis tactic seeks to shield from challenge).
-
We couldn’t help ourselves: The sight of the young, newly released detainee drove us into a paroxysm of laughter. But the laughter quickly morphed into sad embarrassment. The detainee was a boy of 8, in second grade. When we met him this week, on the streets of Hebron, he was on his way to his grandfather’s home. He wore a red sweatshirt emblazoned with an image of Mickey Mouse, and he had a shy smile. His mom had sent him to take something to Grandpa. Eight-year-old Ahmed Abu Rimaileh was not the youngest of the children, schoolbags on their backs, that Israel Defense Forces soldiers took into custody early on Wednesday, last week: His friend, Abdel Rahim, who was arrested with him, is only 7, and in first grade.
-
The chef turned author on the five years he spent in Guantánamo Bay – and why his nickname is the General
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in IRC Logs at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: March 24th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 25th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 26th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 27th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 28th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 29th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 30th, 2013
Enter the IRC channels now
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Patents at 4:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A look at the sneaky ways in which software patents and other abstract patents get advanced
The SHIELD act [1, 2], a face-saving act, is far from sufficient as a fix for the USPTO, where patent maximalism continues to be the mantra and motto. Interestingly enough we totally overlooked this fantastic TechDirt post about the USPTO engaging in crude deception to cover its back. To quote:
Undisclosed USPTO Employees Write Report Saying USPTO Does A Great Job Handling Software & Smartphone Patents
[...]
Notice that they are named as “advisors” to the USPTO, but their full-time roles are not mentioned. In response to the Wayfinder piece, the Journal explained that the roles had changed “at the last minute.” That is, right before publication, they apparently went from being full-time employees to mere advisors…
It is worth noting that other lawyers, patent lawyers like Lundberg et al., are still working hard to legitimise software patents. And not too long ago, Lundberg got a response from TechDirt. He is spreading disinformation, just like USPTO staff. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Apple at 4:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
–Steve Jobs
Summary: More dumb patents from the company that made ripoffs successful
As Apple continues its attack on Android, starting with the HTC lawsuit, people who buy Apple are increasingly upset about patents like rounded rectangles being used offensively. Apple secrecy [1, 2] is a way to assure customers are not made aware of the company’s very ugly side. Here is an attempt to fight this secrecy. Apple’s abuses against Linux-based platforms go years back, before the HTC lawsuit, Apple’s “Steve Jobs Used Patents Like A Mob Boss: Threatened To Sue Palm Over Patents If It Poached Any Apple Employees,” to quote TechDirt, where Glyn Moody and others have been slamming patents lately. Here is another take on Apple patents that are crazy:
Creating that “leak-proof pipe” has long been the dream not only of media companies, but also of computer companies like Apple that hope to collaborate with and ultimately supplant them. A recent patent application, found through the French title Numerama, seeks to make videos uncopiable during playback by locking down the last section of the pipe — the part that connects the computer to the screen.
Apple cannot even get basic security right, yet it wants patents on the above? █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The dark side of the European patent system as revealed and explained in some recent posts
While the “FFII Challenges Software Patents in Europe,” as we put it quite recently, not enough is being done to effectively stop the agenda of multinationals that want software patents everywhere. The FFII and its members have been quiet recently, so the lobbyists can advance with little or no interference.
For software patents in the EU to be rapidly phased in (e.g. through trans-Atlantic unification), the unitary patent is being advanced. The EPO President wrote the other day that the first committee meeting was imminent:
After the adoption of the EU regulations on the unitary patent in December 2012 and the recent signing of the international agreement on the Unified Patent Court, a further milestone was reached last week with the convening of the so-called Select Committee. Representatives of the 25 member states participating in the unitary patent met with the EPO in Munich for the first time, and the European Commission as observer, to launch the Committee’s work.
That this first meeting could take place so soon after the signing of the agreement on the Court is in my view a clear sign of the political will of the participating countries to implement the unitary patent as soon as possible. The results were very positive. The Committee elected two highly qualified and committed participants in the unitary patent process – Jerôme Debrulle, head of the Belgian delegation, and Lubos Knoth, head of the Slovak delegation – to serve as its chair and vice-chair. It also initiated the discussion of its rules of procedure and launched an ambitious plan for its further work in the coming months.
Glyn Moody, a Brit, hopes that Spain can stop this. Last week he asked, “Has Spain Just Slammed On The Brakes For Europe’s Unitary Patent Plans?”
One thing is for sure: if the brakes have indeed been slammed on for the Unitary Patent project, they are unlikely to come off for a good while unless something dramatic happens.
Spain was previously blackmailed for support. In the mean time, reveals TechDirt, EPO is pushing for patent maximalism with financial incentives. Big mistake!
European Patent Office Gives Staff Bonus For Issuing Bumper Crop Of Patents: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
[...]
This gives it an independence from the European Union that is problematic for patent law there. For example, back in 2005, the European Parliament voted definitively not to allow software patents in Europe. And yet as an excellent analysis published on the IPKat site explains, the EPO has continued to move steadily towards granting more and broader software patents in Europe.
Also from TechDirt, here is a recent rebuttal to the idea that by granting more parents you improve innovation. It is utter nonsense of course.
This is unfortunate. Despite plenty of research showing that patents do not, in fact, lead to increased innovation (but rather increased patenting), many still assume that there’s a direct linkage. Of course, it is true that many successful industries see high rates of patents, but there is evidence that patents tend to lag the actual innovation, rather than predate it. That is, once an area or industry is innovative and successful then everyone rushes in to get patents and try to extract their piece of the pie, often slowing down the pace of innovation.
More developers across Europe need to protest against the EPO for choosing to pretend that merely granting a patent somehow improves innovation and brings economic benefits to Europe. █
“Staff at the European Patent Office went on strike accusing the organization of corruption: specifically, stretching the standards for patents in order to make more money.
“One of the ways that the EPO has done this is by issuing software patents in defiance of the treaty that set it up.”
–Richard Stallman
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Further Recent Posts
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
- 2016 Was a Terrible Year for Patent Trolls and 2017 Will Probably be a Lot Worse for Them
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
- Fitbit’s Decision to Drop Patent Case Against Jawbone Shows Decreased Potency of Abstract Patents, Not Jawbone’s Weakness
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
- The EPO Under Benoît Battistelli Makes the Mafia Look Like Rookies
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
- Links 29/12/2016: OpenELEC 7.0, Android Wear 2.0 Smartwatches Coming
Links for the day
- Links 28/12/2016: OpenVPN 2.4, SeaMonkey 2.46
Links for the day
- Bad Service at the European Patent Office (EPO) Escalated in the Form of Complaints to European Authorities/Politicians
A look at actions taken at a political level against the EPO in spite of the EPO's truly awkward exemption from lawfulness or even minimal accountability
- No “New Life to Software Patents” in the US; That's Just Fiction Perpetuated by the Patent Microcosm
Selective emphasis on very few cases and neglect of various other dimensions help create a parallel reality (or so-called 'fake news') where software patents are on the rebound
- Links 27/12/2016: Chakra GNU/Linux Updated, Preview of Fedora 26
Links for the day
- Leaked: Letter to Quality Support (DQS) at the European Patent Office (EPO)
Example of abysmal service at the EPO, where high staff turnover and unreasonable pressure from above may be leading to communication issues that harm stakeholders the most
- Negative Publicity (Personal or by Association With the EPO) is Devouring the Institution
Willy Minnoye, Ciarán McGinley, Lionel Baranès, Theano Evangelou and others near the top of the EPO pyramid recalled in light of old news about them
- 2017 Will be the Year Team Battistelli Collapsed and EPO 'Reform' Became All About Detoxifying the Organisation
Battistelli's circle (or "Team Battistelli") is starting to disintegrate, perhaps in anticipation of a tough year full of new leaks ("WillyLeaks" as some put it)
- With the Demise of Software Patents and Likely Soon Patent Trolls (Based on SCOTUS), Trump Appointments Matter Even More
In light of Trump's awkward history with judges (e.g. attacking them) one can hope that upcoming patent cases at the highest court won't be affected by his pro-big corporations agenda
- Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Bilski Blog is Actually AGAINST Alice and Bilski, in Favour of Software Patents
Looking at some of the latest promotions of software patents in the US and where this is all coming from (and why)
- Free/Open Source Software Under Attack From Software Patents
Free/Open Source software (FOSS), which encourages sharing, is increasingly becoming infested or subjected to software patents barbwire, courtesy of those who want to monopolise rather than share
- Culture of Appeals Against Granted Patents Means Better and Improved Scrutiny, Less Litigation
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), led by David Ruschke, continues to function as another 'layer' that ensures patent quality by weeding out bad patents and here are some of the latest cases
- After Microsoft's Notorious Intervention Nokia is Nothing But a Patent Troll Whose Patent Portfolio Needs to be Smashed
Nokia's saber-rattling (and now lawsuits) against Apple are a worrying sign of what's to come, impacting Android OEMs as well as Apple, which is why the post-Microsoft Nokia is dangerous
- Australia's Productivity Commission Reiterates Opposition to Software Patents, Shelston IP (Patent Microcosm) Upset
Now is the time for Australian software developers to explain to their government that they don't want any software patents, otherwise their voices will be hijacked by a bunch of law firms that totally misrepresent them
Content is available under CC-BY-SA