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02.25.11

Stephen Elop is Bricking Nokia

Posted in Hardware, Microsoft at 4:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time.”

–Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Platform Group Vice President

Summary: The latest Vista Phony 7 problems show why Microsoft’s Stephen Elop had Nokia commit suicide (for the interim elevation of Microsoft)

WE probably do not cover the Nokia story as much as we ought to [1, 2, 3, 4]. We foresaw the situation since the very first day when Elop entered Nokia and we wrote over a dozen posts on the subject before Elop made it all official, e.g.:

  1. Microsoft President Quits, But is Nokia the Next Victim?
  2. Microsoft Passes More of Its Executives to the MSBBC. What About Nokia?
  3. Microsoft Insiders Galore: BBC, Nokia, Others Already Damaged by Microsoft Hires
  4. Taking Over Linux, by Proxy
  5. Linux Battle in Mobile Phones Becomes Primarily Legal, Not Technical, Due to Software Patents
  6. Linspire/Ballnux in Tablets; HP Possibly Experiments With Vista 7 in Slate After Abandoning It, Then Hiring From Microsoft
  7. If You Can’t Beat Them, Hijack Them (Microsoft Joins Nokia and It Already Shows)
  8. New Article Says Nokia Might be Bought by Microsoft After Appointing Microsoft President as CEO
  9. Entryism Watch: Yahoo! Keeps Being Abducted by Microsoft Executives, HP Cancels Android Projects After CEO Appointment From SAP
  10. As Expected, Nokia and HP Betray Linux Under Microsoft-sympathetic New Leadership
  11. Head of Microsoft Romania Quits, Entryism Revisited
  12. Microsoft’s Favourite ‘Reporters’ Are Attacking Nokia, Pushing it Into Microsoft’s Arms
  13. Will Elop Choose the Future (Linux) or His Past (Microsoft) for Nokia?
  14. Analyst Wants Microsoft’s Elop (Now Nokia CEO) to Shoot Down Linux Programmes
  15. Microsoft Disruptors Versus Linux Smartphones Domination
  16. Report: Nokia’s New CEO From Microsoft About to Fire Existing Nokia Executives
  17. Poisoning Mobile Linux With Microsoft Staff and Mono
  18. Microsoft’s President Elop is Allegedly Killing Linux Inside Nokia/Intel, Just When MeeGo Gets Android Compatibility (Updated)
  19. Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Confirm Elop Speaks With His Old Colleagues at Microsoft

Several people have adopted our playful name for WP7, Vista Phony 7. “Vista Phony 7 Pay per Weight Edition launched,” dented several people in recent days. They were referring to the bricking of phones [1, 2], which also resembles the ‘bricking’ of Vista-running machines following ‘bad’ patches (the machines would no longer boot, as we covered at the time). Microsoft’s spin has begun to come out and Microsoft boosters like Peter Bright do their thing while OpenBytes offers a sanity check and Andrew Orlowski, a longtime MAFIAA and Microsoft apologist, says that “Microsoft bricking lesson bodes badly for Elop’s Brave New Nokia” [via Homer et al.]

Earlier this week Microsoft issued, and then withdrew, a software update for its Windows Phone devices. According to Microsoft it affected “a small number” of users of Samsung WP7 phones. For some users the consequences were serious – the phone was “bricked”, meaning it was not only non-functional, but couldn’t be restored into a working state by the user.
Click here to find out more!

It’s a nightmare for the manufacturer, because it requires an expensive return to a repair centre, and the customer, once burned, is much less likely to become a repeat purchaser. That “small number” may be as high as ten per cent.

Bizarrely, the patch didn’t contain any new features. It was a notification about new features to come, the equivalent of that little alert you get in XP telling you that there’s a new version of Software Update available – which really means you’re several hours (and reboots) away from having an update to the system.

[...]

He evidently has a low regard for Nokia’s ability to get things done quickly, and so has handed Nokia’s WP development to small teams, to work closely with Microsoft and in isolation from the juggernaut of the bureaucracy he inherited. In essence, he’s created a skunkworks within Nokia, while the old company is destroyed around it.

Jobs did something similar when he returned to Apple. Elop’s conundrum is that he still needs a large, complex administrative apparatus to produce modern phones.

Richard Hillesley has a somewhat belated analysis of the Nokia situation:

Nokia is exposed and naked in the storm and has several open source technologies in its care. Nokia’s agreement with Microsoft and the subsequent downgrading of MeeGo will have knock-on effects for the Linux ecosystem. Many smaller companies have been funded by Nokia to work on MeeGo, and withdrawal of funding could be damaging in other areas.

Intel’s AppUp is affected pretty badly by Elop’s sabotage and just a few days ago someone from the AppUp blog ranted about the Windows side of AppUp:

So yeah, there’s just a little venting of frustration there but the final word is in where we’ve come TO and not where we’ve come FROM. Each app gets a little easier, we make fewer mistakes and we learn more tricks. More to the point – we keep on submitting apps, which should be filed under “actions speak louder than words.”

Windows is just a mess and Intel knows that too. Nokia did not need Windows. Over the years it deliberately avoided Windows because it realised that it needed to have some control over the operating system and its features/cost. Elop has just bricked Nokia for Microsoft’s benefit and we’ll continue to deliver updates on the subject on a daily basis, under “Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo” in our lump of links. It is a serious case study demostrating Microsoft entryism. Elop even had a lot of Microsoft shares when he did this, and none of Nokia’s. █

I’m not a Trojan horse: Nokia’s Elop hits back at neigh sayers

Nixon “I’m not a crook” press conference

The Main Difference Between Real PCs and Proprietary Systems

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mac vs GNU/Linux
Picture published by Linux wizard Gerard Braad (we were unable to find the original source)

Summary: Ending the illusion that two proprietary operating systems which have stores ‘glue’ them to hardware are actually the only game in town

WE do not regularly post funny pictures (sometimes we link to them to avoid copyright infringement), but the above is the exception because it says so much in just one single image and it can be left to people’s imagination and interpretation.

A Microsoft booster from the MSBBC has just published an article comparing Apple and Microsoft stores, obviously promoting the illusion of just two bogus and proprietary choices, just like in politics (where both/all major parties belong to Big Business). Gordon — perhaps replying to this man (Rory) — wrote about “The Microsoft Store”, noting that the game of brands can deceive a lot of people and the corporate press will just play along.

People have a perception of “Mac v PC” not “Apple OSX v Microsoft Windows”. The branding is there, and Microsoft are the generic no-namers that are as common as muck. A “PC” means “Personal Computer”; ie the OS and the hardware as a combo. This means that Macs are PCs, so are Windows PCs, so are Linux PCs. They are all just a combo of hardware and OS allowing for software to be installed, hardware connected to personalise the device to perform certain tasks.

Most non-techy people don’t know what Windows, Internet Explorer etc is even if they use it all day at work. They switch on their PC, go make coffee, catch up with some gossip and come back to wait for Windows to boot up. They are oblivious to the Microsoft brand. This is not a fertile ground to open a store around that brand, specially when it puts it in people’s faces that it’s another “me too” clone of an Apple store without the sparkle.

Real PCs are GNU/Linux (or no-OS); bundled PCs may only have Windows on them. Sadly, however, we live in an age with an implicit collusion where just about any PC gets delivered saddled with an operating system which people do not need. For the first time in ages, today I needed to approach a Windows-running (or Windows-saddled) PC for a minute as it had a printer connected to it and this was an awful, awful experience. It is very clear to longtime GNU/Linux users that they are extracting a lot more value from their PCs (hardware). Will ‘mainstream’ press like the MSBBC give GNU/Linux fair coverage? Or will the chicken-and-egg cycle carry on? That’s the cycle where the MSBBC says that almost nobody uses GNU/Linux and actively plays a role in ensuring nobody can use it (c/f iPlayer fiasco), let alone knows about it. A lot of today’s MSBBC management consists of former Microsoft UK executives. We’ll write about media distortion by Microsoft later tonight. █

1PlusV, Microsoft, and the Anti-Google AstroTurf

Posted in Google, Microsoft at 3:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microsoft dirty tactics

Summary: The latest action against Google comes from 1PlusV while AstroTurfing group ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ carries on with the anti-Google agenda, this time with the “somebody, think of the children!” tactics

GOOGLE deserves a lot of scrutiny, but much of the scrutiny is fake, or at least greatly exaggerated by Google’s rivals to whom Google is not significant threat as a search engine but as an operating systems and office suite competitor.

Over the years we have written dozens of posts that show Microsoft’s role in antitrust action against Google. Microsoft cannot compete fairly and it has a lot of influence through former partners and employees — those who enable Microsoft to cheat.

The MSBBC has some superficial coverage that can also be found elsewhere [1, 2, 3, 4]. The latter article adds information of interest: “Guillard also stated that Google’s actions meant that another site operated by 1plusV, Eguides.fr, had lost a contract with the French national library to help make its resources available online.

“”Because of the traffic collapse” the French library “understandably thought that Eguides.fr was no longer a suitable partner and signed an agreement with Microsoft,” 1plusV said.”

There is no evidence to suggest that antitrust in this particular case is tied to Microsoft, but based on a lot of references that we accumulated, Microsoft does — by all means — use other companies to create a stir and daemonise Google, then troubling Google’s business. Sometimes the attacking company receives its bribe from Microsoft well after the attack starts, suggests evidence from the SCO case, TurboHercules, and more. Mark Hachman from IDG mentioned Techrights in his new article which mentions the role of ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’, an AstroTurfing group whose sole focus appears to be anti-Google agenda:

But Consumer Watchdog has also been accused of being unfairly critical of Google, especially after a mammoth video advertisement against Google appeared in Times Square. TechRights.org has gone so far to claim that the organization has been hired by Microsoft to attack a competitor.

The article is about ‘Consumer’ ‘Watchdog’ using sentimental blackmail (children) to daemonise Google. That’s the latest strategy and it is similar to their portrayal of Google’s CEO as some kind of paedophile selling ice cream.

These AstroTurfers are using government officials now, characteristically using parts of the system that are Microsoft’s last resort. And then there’s Murdoch’s Google witch-hunt [1, 2], which goes a long way back [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. █

Links 25/2/2011: GNOME 3 Beta 1, Fedora 16 to Ship With BTRFS

Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Ubuntu is the 4th Most Popular Linux Distribution on Web Servers, Continues to Grow Faster

      Ubuntu has been the most popular Linux distribution on desktop systems for sometime now and according to Google Trends data, Ubuntu probably is the first ever Linux distro to overshoot popularity of Linux itself. And now, Ubuntu is steadily increasing its market share on web servers as well. According to w3techs.com statistics, Ubuntu is now the 4th most popular Linux distro on web servers and growing at a much faster rate than its competitors.

    • SGI lays off 4 per cent of workforce

      Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics tightened its financial belt yesterday, announcing that it was laying off employees to make its fiscal 2011 numbers.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 3 Episode 4

      Title: Qt, or not Qt?

      In this episode: Microsoft and Nokia form an alliance and the GPLv3 might not be welcome on Windows Phone. Canonical gets controversial with Banshee while openSUSE and Fedora users might have to wait for Unity. Hear our discoveries, our limited success with the challenge, and your own opinions in our Open Ballot.

  • Kernel Space

    • Lomoco Is Still Around For Logitech Mice On Linux

      While we haven’t talked about Lomoco in a few years nor has there been a new release of this free software project for Logitech Mouse Control under Linux in a while, Lomoco is still being developed. Andreas Schneider is still working on Linux support for the latest Logitech mice via Lomoco.

  • Applications

    • TorChat, anonymous and secure messaging and file transfers

      Using the Tor network of virtual tunnels, TorChat is a small, portable and open-source IM client that allows for completely anonymous and secure communications and file sharing. It works on both Windows and Linux.

    • Proprietary

      • Barracuda gets some teeth

        Today we will ship the first of many changes for Speed Dial that is targeted for the upcoming Barracuda release. It will however be delivered in separate pieces before you will see the entire puzzle laid out.

        Opera’s Speed Dial was first introduced in an Opera 9.20 snapshot on Feb 28th 2007. The idea came about as we observed that people kept typing the same addresses for a few of their favourite websites again and again. Getting to their top web sites could mean hundreds or thousands of clicks on the keyboard in a single day. The solution we came up with was very simple, but very powerful. And today it’s still one of the most loved, and copied, features in Opera.

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome Shell 2.91.90 Released – Screenshots And Video

        Here is a video I’ve recorded with the latest Gnome Shell 2.91.90 – not the best quality but as usual, the Shell recorder doesn’t play very nice with my Nvidia graphics card…

      • GNOME 3 Beta 1 (2.91.90) released!

        One more important step towards the great GNOME 3 release! It’s pretty clear that things are getting much more stable release-wise. Thanks everyone! This release has got a quite a lot of updates including bugs fixes and user-visible improvements in GNOME Shell. The Network Manager bits are going through a lot of changes for the 0.9 release.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Zorin OS 4 Review

        Recently I have reviewed a number of interesting Ubuntu derivatives. Linux Mint is probably the most popular one, but other more obscure picks like MoonOS and PinguyOS also proved to be very interesting options. In future articles I also plan to review Bodhi Linux, but this time I want to talk about Zorin 4 OS, which is based off of Ubuntu 10.10.

        [...]

        I would recommend Zorin to any kind of Linux user, but specially for those who are taking their first steps in the Penguin Universe.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6 Has A Few Rough Spots: Review

        Debian’s kFreeBSD flavour works around these licensing issues by marrying the GNU C library and userland with the kernel from FreeBSD 8. As a result, this version of Debian inherits the kernel features and hardware support of FreeBSD, while maintaining compatibility with most of the Debian software package catalogue.

        [...]

        I was pleased to note that some of the software management tools I’m accustomed to using in Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative) have made it back upstream.

      • 7 mistakes to avoid when participating to Debian mailing lists

        You’re eager to start contributing to Debian, your first action is to subscribe to some high-profile mailing lists (like debian-devel and debian-project) to get a feel of the community. You read the mails for a few days and then you find out that you could participate to the discussions, it’s a simple first step after all. True enough.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Inspiration
        • Version number suggests Ubuntu changes
        • Ubuntu Compromises on Banshee Revenue Recipients

          Canonical and Ubuntu encountered quite a bit of resistance from its community recently when it changed the default Banshee profit sharing recipient. By default, in Banshee The GNOME Foundation was to receive a portion of revenue from music sales through the AmazonMP3 store. But in a recent Ubuntu 11.04 snapshot, users noticed that recipient was changed to Canonical. After a bit of an uprising from users and Banshee developers, Jono Bacon today announced a compromise.

        • Ubuntu Linux for beginners: Tips for getting started

          Maybe it was one piece of malware too many, maybe it was realizing that while Windows 7 doesn’t look like XP, there really wasn’t that much better about it, in any case the day had come when you decided to give Ubuntu Linux a try. Here’s what you need to know to make the most of your new experiment in operating systems.

        • It’s time — apply NOW! UDS -O

          What’s the worst that can happen, after all? Canonical can say no, and then you’ll have to attend remotely. But what if the best happens, and they say YES? They told me yes, and flew me to Florida! The travel agents arranged to have me fly in early, so I could spend some time with my long-time friend who lives north of Orlando. (This time, the city is Budapest!)

        • Thinking About Ubuntu Developer Summit Attendance and Sponsorship?
        • Unity 2d’s new design in motion [Video]

          Unity 2D – the Qt implementation of Ubuntu’s Unity interface that doesn’t require 3D graphic drivers, etc. – is advancing apace.

        • New Unity 2D Design On The Way (Video)

          The changes you can see in the above video are not yet available in the Unity 2D PPA, but expect it to land soon.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • My favorite Linux desktop: Mint 10

            Over the years, I’ve seen more Linux distributions than anyone this side of the Distrowatch editors. Some end-up staying in my offices. For example, I use openSUSE and CentOS on my servers, and I’ve often used Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, and MEPIS on my desktops and laptops. I’m also constantly looking at new Linux distributions, such as SplashTop and Peppermint on my test boxes or a VirtualBox virtual machine. Now, though, I find myself using Mint 10 as my main Linux desktop.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • MeeGo / Qt – Alive and Kicking

          During the last week in MWC Barcelona I had countless meetings, and even larger number of phone calls after that, always starting with an equally blunt question: “what is happening, is MeeGo dead now?” After “buckets of cold water”, and the following chaos, the dust seems to be settled now. Follow MeeGoers are getting themselves reorganized. Personally I got an excellent excuse and decided to start this blog to shed some light for the current development, and to do my duty for the community and the business.

      • Android

        • WebM/VP8 support appears in Android 2.3.3

          Google’s recently announced Android 2.3.3, “Gingerbread”, is according to Google, now starting to be delivered OTA (Over The Air) to Nexus S and Nexus One smartphones. It appears that 2.3.3, as well as adding support for NFC (Near Field Communications) as found in the Nexus S, has also added WebM support. The details of the WebM support are on the Android Media Formats page where a new entry for the VP8 codec, as used by the WebM container format, has been added with the note “Android 2.3.3+”.

        • AT&T: HTC Aria getting Android 2.2 (Froyo) tomorrow

          AT&T has informed its friends that an Android 2.2 (Froyo) update for HTC’s mid-level Aria handset will be ready for public consumption beginning tomorrow. Ma’ Bell is asking eager Aria owners to hit up the company’s Facebook page tomorrow for download instructions.

        • “The Daily” coming to Android this Spring. Does anyone care?
        • Asus Brings Five Android Devices To China In Bid For Billions Of New Customers

          On Thursday afternoon in Beijing, Asus plans to announce a wide-ranging partnership with China Mobile that will make four Asus smartphones and one tablet available to the carrier’s millions of customers.

          The deal is the cornerstone of Asus’ newest strategy to boost its mobile devices business. Though Asus is widely known for its computer parts, laptops and netbooks, it remains a bit player in the global cellphone and smartphone markets.

        • Impressive video visualizes Android activations from October 2008 to January 2011

          I don’t think any technology enthusiast is unaware of Android’s rapid growth — there are a staggering 350 000 Android devices activated every day and even fans of other mobile platforms must have noticed that Google’s OS is everywhere now.

          Although Android’s rise in popularity was expected, the open-source platform was once the underdog and fans only had a small number of devices to choose from. Initially, there was of course just one single Android phone: the HTC Dream (G1).

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Splashtop Linux: A Free Chrome OS Alternative

        Web surfers tired of waiting for the official release of hardware featuring Google’s Chrome OS now have a browser-based alternative right at their fingertips: Splashtop Linux 1.0, a downloadable instant-on operating system tailored to life in the cloud.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The economics of a (software) cartel

    Early on it becomes fairly clear the article is written with an agenda:

    How, if at all, should governments use [open source software (OSS)]? One important theoretical insight starts from the observation that [OSS is] …imperfect [and] has distinct areas of advantage and disadvantage (von Engelhardt 2008). This implies that large modern economies will usually require a mix of both [OSS and closed source software (CSS)].

    The article goes on:

    [Engelhardt and Maurer] point out that the existence of CSS code increases OSS output and vice versa. To see why, consider an all-OSS world in which each company offers consumers exactly the same shared code as every other company. By definition no company can then compete by writing more OSS code than its rivals. This lack of competition suppresses code production for the same reason that cartels suppress output.

    From this point the argument is reasonably constructed and more or less appropriate in its conclusions. But this premise, that a pure open source world would (a) result in less code production and the implication (b) that that would inherently be “a bad thing” is totally unfounded.

    So, as it is a very good place to start, I’ll start at the beginning; with the definition of the economic concept referred to, a cartel.

    A cartel in economic theory is generally seen to occur at a particular point in a range of market types. This range stretches from perfect competition to monopoly. A monopoly market is the condition which the game of the same name defines as victory, that is the absence of competition. Perfect competition at the other end of the scale is a market where all parties know all things about the goods sold in the market (known as perfect knowledge) and it is easy to set up in business. As is clear in the terminology used, perfect competition is seen to be good and monopolies bad.

    Economists see a sliding scale between monopoly and perfect competition, and degrees along the way. It is generally accepted that a near or effective monopoly is as bad as a monopoly; a near monopoly can be seen to exist in a market where a single company controls more than two thirds of that market. Below a monopoly in economic badness lies an oligopoly, where a small number of large companies control the majority of a market. It is at this point in the scale that cartels are seen to form. A cartel is where a number of firms in the oligopoly get together and conspire to fix pricing, using their power to inhibit competition, to create an effective monopoly.

  • The Ada Initiative Announces Advisory Board

    More information about the advisors can be found in the press release and on the advisors web page. “The advisory board will work closely with the Ada Initiative founders in planning and executing their projects.”

  • The role of Open Source and Free software in today’s world, excellences, issues and frontiers to cross: an expert talk with Roberto Galoppini

    Unless you are going for the obvious names (Apache, Linux, etc) – for which you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that are sustainable projects – it is worth to have a method to create a short list of candidates on which to perform all functional and performance tests. In fact verification and validation tests require a significant amount time and resources to be run, that is why a method to limit the number of candidates maybe of great help.

    SOS Open Source is just an automated methodology to find and evaluate open source software, collecting information from the net and code analysis tools, correlating and aggregating it all in graphs for easy comparisons.

  • Apache opens Chemistry content management tool kit

    In an effort to make content management systems work more harmoniously with one another, the Apache Software Foundation has promoted its Apache Chemistry interoperability toolkit to a top level project.

    Chemistry is an open source implementation of the CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) standard, developed by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). CMIS provides a set of bindings for accessing data across multiple CMIS-compliant systems, without the need to understand the specific interface for each system.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • First attempt to have proper ad blocking in Chrome

        The current development build (Adblock Plus for Google Chrome 1.0.26.622) removes the restriction that only some filters will really block downloads. It should block everything that the previous version was blocking and some more. So if you notice something that is no longer being blocked (as well as other issues of course), please report it with a comment here or in the forum.

      • Chromium: Why it isn’t in Fedora yet as a proper package

        People keep asking me about chromium (the generic name for Google Chrome), specifically, when it will be part of Fedora proper. Why do they ask me this? Well, because I’ve been packaging built-from-source-against-Fedora RPM packages here: http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/

    • Mozilla

      • Poll: How would you use Firefox Add-on Sync?
      • Correction regarding opting out of add-on metadata pings

        Two weeks ago we posted about add-on metadata pings in Firefox 4 and included information on how to opt out of them. Shortly afterwards, a bug was discovered that caused the opt out process to not work properly.

      • How to support 400 million users with 4 people

        At Mozilla we have around 400 million Firefox users by now, that means that offering traditional support to them is completely impossible, especially since the support team has only 5 employees. But we still want happy users, and the only way that works is when users help other users. So, after evaluating the situation, we spent most of last year designing the best possible tools for our community. Because we are facing the same challenges most free software projects will face, I wanted to share our assessment and our solutions with the broader free software community, and since I needed a catchy title, it’s called “How to support 400 Million users with 4 employees.”

      • Firefox 4.0 beta 5 released

        The latest build of Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 5 for Android and Maemo has been released and is available for download for the N900 here. This release was focused on continuing to improve stability and performance.

  • SaaS

    • What’s the problem with Twitter?

      Every day, we suspend hundreds of applications that are in violation of our policies.
      (Carolyn Penner on support.twitter.com, 18.02.11)

      Twitter reputes to act as the Boss and pinches off third party clients again, telling that it’s no isolated case.

      [...]

      The most progressive idea in my opinion was delivered by Eben Moglen last week: Promoting the establishment of decentralized networks and making efforts to develop so-called Freedom Boxes with the newly formed FreedomboxFoundation. And apparently they touch a nerve: Where else would come NYTimes’ interest from? Or the huge number of $60,000 of donations in just 5 days?

  • CMS

    • Angela Byron on Drupal 7

      AB: I’ve been interested in free software ever since I first heard the term back in 1995, back when I completed my first successful Linux installation—this was back when Debian fit on 7 floppy disks. ;) I was both intrigued and excited by the profound humanitarian implications of the free software movement. Better-than-commercial-quality software, available to be tinkered with and expanded upon by anyone with an interest and drive to learn, given away at no cost to everyone, including non-profits and educational institutions. I became a fierce advocate of open source alternatives among my family and friends, and I was totally “that person” in school who would demand that in addition to teaching us ASP and Oracle, we needed to also learn PHP and MySQL.

  • Healthcare

    • Monopoly on pesticide test data set to be extended to 5 years

      The government has proposed an increase in the monopoly period enjoyed by pesticide manufacturers over test data , used to support claims for the efficacy of their products, to five years. The proposals form part of amendments to the pesticides bill, which were circulated to MPs last week. The amendment may prove controversial given that similar provisions, with respect to pharmaceuticals have been opposed by India in its negotiations with the European Union.

  • Project Releases

  • Government

    • UK Government defines open standards as royalty free

      Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius IT, a UK open source integrator, who has previously led calls for more open source and free software use by government, told The H that the “Cabinet Office’s new Policy statement is simply the best of any European Government to date, and a great step forward in levelling the playing field for Open Source software”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Creative Commons sponsors WikiSym 2011

      We are thrilled to announce our involvement in the 7th annual WikiSym, International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. WikiSym explores the impact of wikis, open resources, and open technologies across all sectors of society, including education, law, journalism, art, science, publishing, business, and entertainment.

      WikiSym 2011 will be held in Mountain View, California on October 3-5. You don’t want to miss this conference. WikiSym draws an international group of leading thinkers from industry, non-profits and academia. Last year’s WikiSym 2010 in Poland was packed with exciting people and ideas. WikiSym 2011 is gearing up to be the best gathering on open collaboration ever held.

    • Open Data

      • The Privatization Of Public Data Sets A Bad Precedent

        Last summer we wrote about a troubling lawsuit filed by a company called Public Engines against a competitor called Report See. Each company runs their own open website that reports crime data. Public Engines runs CrimeReports.com. Report See runs SpotCrime.com. They have very different business models, however. CrimeReports is ad free. It makes its money because Public Engines signs expensive deals with local police departments around the country to take their crime data and format it for better use. SpotCrime, on the other hand, whose business model is based on advertising, collects whatever data it can from public sources, including police departments who publish the data, newspaper crime reports… and, at one point, the data it found on CrimeReports.com.

    • Open Hardware

      • DARPA Open-Sources Military Vehicle Design
      • Amazing MeeBlip Users, Making MeeBlips, Playing MeeBlips, and Other News From Our $140 Synth

        We introduced the MeeBlip, an open source, hackable synthesizer, back in early November. Designed by James Grahame of Reflex Audio (and blog Retro Thing) and co-produced with CDM, we placed the hardware and software of the MeeBlip under an open source hardware license, and it was something of an experiment for us. Affordability was paramount – you can get everything you need for $140 US; less if you’re willing to do a little DIY work. Now, the MeeBlip has made its way out into the world and into hands other than just our own, and we’re thrilled to see what people are doing with it.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • W3C Technologies for Mobile Web Applications

      I often get the chance of talking with developers, reporters and analysts about what technologies W3C is developing that are relevant for the ongoing debate on the role of the Web in mobile applications.

      While I have mostly a clear idea on the topic, there wasn’t a complete enough reference that I knew of on the topic, and that knowledge has been spread across various Working Group home pages, slidesets, specifications, etc.

    • Do Not Track at W3C

      Over the last year, W3C has ramped up its activities in the privacy space: Within the context of the PrimeLife project, we’ve looked at privacy considerations for device APIs, at policy languages, and we’ve taken a look at the broader Web and Internet privacy picture together with the Internet Society, the Internet Architecture Board, and some colleagues from MIT. As part of our strategic planning exercise, we have committed to further increase our focus on the topic.

Leftovers

  • The battle of the US-Mexico frontier

    Charlie Bruce was a Texas police chief of the old school. In more than four decades on the force he gave homegrown criminals good reason to steer clear of Del Rio, his small town on the United States’s southern border, but held no grudge against the steady flow of Mexicans across the frontier in search of opportunity. He admired them for their hard work and the chances they took to better themselves. Besides, some of them built his house.

  • Is it ethical to automate business?

    From an economic point of view, software often automates business processes that were formerly done manually. For example, contrast the human effort involved in accounting before and after spreadsheets. Of course the reduction in human labor has not been restricted to accounting. For example, enterprise resource planning software has facilitated detailed procurement based on actual customer demand, with full modeling of suppliers, plants, warehouses, work centers & cost centers. This degree of automation was not possible prior to ubiquitous computer networking. Technology makes it possible to do the same amount of work with fewer people.

  • Maybe Super Cheap Video Games Are Helping, Not Destroying, The Video Game Industry

    One of the early economics lessons you learn in any competent intro econ class is the concept of elasticity. The basic concept is how much does demand increase for a product if you lower the price. If a product is highly elastic, decreasing the price can often earn you more money. A simplified version of this: I have a widget that I want to sell for $100 dollars, but only one person is willing to pay that price. With that pricing, I’d make $100 (gross) on the widget. However, if I were to drop the price to $1, let’s say 1,000 people are willing to buy at that price. Then, I’d make $1,000 (gross) on the widget. So, even though producers often fear lowering the price, if there’s strong elasticity, lowering the price can often make you much more money (and, yes, the marginal cost matters here as well).

  • Case Study: How TED Learned That ‘Giving It Away’ Increased Both Popularity And Revenue

    The amazingly exclusive conference used to be excessively secretive as well. Attendees, who paid thousands for the privilege (and who could only attend if they were “invited”), had to sign non-disclosure agreements, and no one was supposed to publicly discuss or show what the TED speakers talked about. If you think about this from a classical “scarcities-only” economics viewpoint, you can see why people would think this was smart. After all, that content is valuable, so the natural desire is to hoard it, with the classical thinking being that by hoarding it and putting up an artificial scarcity around the content, you make it more valuable.

  • Old Media Is Being Unbundled, Just Like Telecom Was

    One of the biggest stories of my career — as someone who covered telecom industry — happened fifteen years ago: The 1996 Telecom Act was the start of the liberalization of an industry that had been vertical with very little competition. What followed was an amazing transformation of the staid calling industry — not necessarily for the better.

    One of the basic tenets of the 1996 Telecom Act was unbundled access to the telecom facilities of the local phone companies, which meant competing phone companies could access the so-called “last-mile” that led to people’s homes over the incumbent carrier’s network. The change in law created an insane amount of competition, and turned the economics of the business on its head. It led to kamikaze-style pricing of phone minutes. Voice had been the primary source of revenue for phone companies for nearly a century.

  • UK Government roundtable on online future

    Culture Ministers have met with key players from the music and creative industries yesterday to discuss ways to develop new online services.

    Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt and Communications and Creative Industries Minister Ed Vaizey held the roundtable with internet service providers such as BT, Talk Talk and BSkyB alongside representatives from UK Music, PRS for Music, AIM, BPI, Universal, Warner Music, Sony and Beggars Group.

  • I’m still in charge, says David Cameron on Gulf trip

    David Cameron has insisted that he remains “in charge” despite his absence from Britain after his deputy Nick Clegg said he “forgot” that he was running the country.

    Speaking in Oman on the final leg of his tour of the Middle East, the prime minister stressed: “Just because I leave the country doesn’t mean I am not in charge.”

    He was pressed on comments made by the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister to the Metro newspaper in which Nick Clegg said he was looking forward to holidaying with his children at the end of the week and someone else would have to take over from him.

  • Study Finds the Internet Makes Youth More Engaged Citizens

    Arguably, the upheaval, activism and revolutions in of the last two months may serve to counter what has been a longstanding stereotype: youth are largely apolitical. Moreover, those that do participate in politics and activism online do so in shallow ways, the so-called “slacktivism.” But recent findings from a longitudinal study of high school-age students challenges these notions, suggesting that youth who pursue their interests online are more likely to be engaged in civic issues.

  • Google Launches Smart Recipe Search Tools

  • Science

    • Discovery set to blast off one last time

      NASA’s most travelled space shuttle, Discovery, was fuelled Thursday for its final voyage after nearly three decades of service.

      NASA finished pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel into Discovery at midmorning, as the six astronauts assigned to the space station delivery mission got ready at crew quarters for the late afternoon liftoff. It was their second stab at this. November’s launch attempt never made it this far.

    • Exciting New Research on Topological Insulators

      Topological insulators have become one of the hottest topics in physics. These new materials act as both insulators and conductors, with their interior preventing the flow of electrical currents while their edges or surfaces allow the movement of a charge.

  • Hardware

    • Intel’s Thunderbolt to Strike at Media Transfer

      Intel’s Thunderbolt connection technology, announced Thursday, will help consumers with one of their biggest digital problems: transferring huge media files in minutes as opposed to hours. It will also give Intel chips a home inside a variety of connected devices. For consumers, it means transferring an entire iTunes library won’t take all night (instead it would take a few minutes), and backups are a speedy dream.

    • Inside Google Native Client for x86 binaries

      Last week, Google announced a new version of its SDK for Native Client (aka NaCl, in a riff on the chemical formula for salt). For those who don’t recall, NaCl is the technology I once called “Google’s craziest idea yet.” In a nutshell, it allows developers to deliver code modules for Web applications in the form of native x86 binaries that execute on the user’s bare CPU — no interpreter, no virtual machine, no nothing.

      I called the idea crazy, but it’s really crazy clever. As Native Client continues to evolve, I thought it was high time I checked under the hood to see how this nutball idea actually worked in practice. To that end, I downloaded the new SDK, fired up my toolkit, and put a few of Google’s demo NaCl applications through their paces.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Dying Ont. baby’s transfer to Detroit denied

      A Windsor, Ont., family’s mission to bring their terminally ill baby home to die has suffered another blow after a Detroit hospital refused to accept him for a tracheotomy.

      The parents of Joseph Maraachli, a 13-month-old with a fatal neurological disorder, had hoped to be able to transfer their ailing son to the Children’s Hospital of Michigan.

    • Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity

      Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have found that less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna, raising new questions about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted from cellphones.

      The researchers, led by Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, urged caution in interpreting the findings because it is not known whether the changes, which were seen in brain scans, have any meaningful effect on a person’s overall health.

    • Spy in the tuckshop at kids’ lunches

      CASHLESS canteens are the new weapon against obesity, letting parents spy on their children’s lunches online.

      The swipe-card technology also allows parents to block their kids from buying junk food.

      At Kardinia International College in Geelong, Victoria, students can buy items at the canteen only with an electronic card.

    • How the British fell out of love with drugs

      “A lot of young people who have used the stronger stuff simply don’t like it,” Barnes suggests. “That could be having an impact . . . What we also have seen, and it could be linked to the overall decline in illicit drug use, is fewer young people smoking . . . We do know that, for young people in particular, if they smoke or drink they are much more likely also to be using illegal drugs. Tobacco is probably the main ‘gateway drug’.”

      This sounds logical. The act of smoking takes a bit of getting used to; if young people are not practising on cigarettes, they are probably less likely to try joints. The fading fashion for cigarettes, in other words, might be dragging cannabis down with it. But then one never knows when an ageing fashion might perk up again.

    • Clayton Christensen: The Survivor

      Clayton Christensen beat a heart attack, advanced-stage cancer and a stroke in three years. Here’s what he learned about life, death and fixing the health care system.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Libya after Gadhafi

      With revolution spreading throughout Libya, chances are increasing that Moammar Gadhafi will release the brutal stranglehold he’s had on the country for over 40 years.

      “He will fall; it’s not if; it’s when,” said Jens Hanssen, an assistant professor of Middle East history at the University of Toronto. “I give him days rather than weeks.”

    • Gadhafi blames al-Qaeda for Libyan riots

      Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi blamed international terrorism and al-Qaeda for brainwashing youth and spurring the turmoil in his country.

      “What is happening now is not the people’s power. It is international terrorism led by al-Qaeda,” Gadhafi said in a rambling 30-minute phone call broadcast live on state television Thursday.

    • Report: Libya air force bombs protesters heading for army base

      Libyan military aircraft fired live ammunition at crowds of anti-government protesters in Tripoli, Al Jazeera television reported on Monday, quoting witnesses for its information.

    • BREAKING: Soldiers in Derna massacred for not firing at Libyans (GRAPHIC)
    • Mercenaries Captured in Libya With Passports [VIDEO]
    • Breaking Images: Oppostion to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime with a tank in Misrata (Feb. 23)
    • Libya unrest: David Cameron apology for UK response

      Prime Minister David Cameron has said he is “incredibly sorry” for the government’s handling of the evacuation of British nationals from Libya.

    • Libya: Gaddafi’s billions to be seized by Britain

      The funds are expected to be seized within days. The Treasury is understood to have set up a unit to trace Col Gaddafi’s assets in Britain, which are thought to include billions of dollars in bank accounts, commercial property and a £10 million mansion in London.

      In total, the Libyan regime is said to have around £20 billion in liquid assets, mostly in London. These are expected to be frozen as part of an international effort to force the dictator from power. A Whitehall source said: “The first priority is to get British nationals out of Libya. But then we are ready to move in on Gaddafi’s assets, the work is under way. This is definitely on the radar at the highest levels.”

    • Libya on the brink as Gaddafi promises showdown – live updates

      5.06pm: The Maltese ministry of foreign affairs is denying Gaddafi’s daughter was on board the Libyan plane that was turned away (see 4.51pm).

    • Global community isolates Gaddafi

      International condemnation of the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Libya has escalated, with the European Union pushing for a UN-led probe into human rights abuses and preparing for possible sanctions against the African nation.

      A draft proposal by the 27-nation bloc on Wednesday spoke out against “extremely grave human rights violations committed in Libya, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of peaceful demonstrators,” and said they could “amount to crimes against humanity”.

    • Foreign Mercenaries in the Middle East: A Brief History

      Though difficult to substantiate in the current chaos, reports from eastern Libya, in particular from the city of Benghazi, claim that snipers and militiamen from sub-Saharan Africa gunned down residents on the streets. The Dubai-based al-Arabiya network says some of the guerrillas were Francophone mercenaries recruited by one of the sons of dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Qatar-based al-Jazeera detailed pamphlets circulated to mercenary recruits from Guinea and Nigeria, offering them $2,000 per day to crack down on the Libyan uprising. And, as further reports of defections from the Libyan military filter in, the cornered Gaddafi regime may turn more and more to hired guns from abroad. On television channels and Twitter, frantic rumors circulated about Gaddafi preparing for a mercenary-backed counteroffensive against his opponents. (See pictures of the rise of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi.)

    • Bahrainis protest peacefully in capital

      Tens of thousands of protesters waving red-and-white Bahraini flags flooded the central district of the capital Tuesday in the largest demonstration since a Shiite-led campaign against the government began eight days ago.

      People packed Pearl Square, the heart of the protests, as the country’s Shiite majority continued to press for concessions from the Sunni monarchy. But the day brought little political resolution.

    • Iraqis prepare for ‘Day of Wrath’ as protests turn violent

      Encouraged by the events in the neighboring Arab countries, Iraqis are gathering in central Baghdad preparing for their ‘Day of wrath’ on Friday. They’re fed up with corruption and want better living conditions.

    • The UN is ripe for advancing the Palestinian agenda

      The most important and, from Israel’s standpoint, alarming change is this: In the one UN body that has the authority to forcibly enforce resolutions, a new alignment of forces is rapidly taking shape, and a new distribution of influence is emerging between the United States and the other four members of the exclusive club of states with permanent membership and veto power.

    • Ivory Coast protesters killed calling for Laurent Gbagbo to step down

      Ivorian troops have killed at least six protesters who were calling on Laurent Gbagbo to step down as leader, witnesses say, as African presidents charged with resolving Ivory Coast’s crisis arrived in Abidjan.

      A dispute over the presidential election in November paralysed the country and led to the deaths of about 300 people.

    • Soldiers jailed for mass rape as Congo finally acts on abuse

      In a landmark case human rights activists hope will reduce a culture of impunity for sex crimes in the beleaguered central African country, a military court has convicted a lieutenant colonel in the Congolese army to 20 years’ imprisonment for mass rapes committed on New Year’s Day.

      Alongside Lieutenant Colonel Kibibi Mutware, a former rebel absorbed into government forces, three other officers received 20-year sentences. Another five soldiers received between 10 and 15 years.

    • U.S. Resumes Deportations to Haiti—One Deportee Dies

      They tell us is it’s all about public safety, keeping the American public safe.

      What they told us at the time [that they announced the new policy] was they were going to be deporting the worst of the worst criminal offenders—axe murderers, rapists, that kind of thing. We subsequently learned that anybody who is labeled a criminal— and in Florida, for example, if you’re driving with an expired driver’s license for four months, you’ve committed a crime—that even individuals like that could be subject to removal under this new policy. So obviously, we were very concerned.

    • When Will George W. Bush be Tried for His War Crimes?

      We should take a small measure of satisfaction in former President George W. Bush’s cancellation of his trip to Switzerland after human-rights groups threatened to bring legal action against him for authorizing torture. Persons detained by the U.S. government after 9/11 were subjected to what the Bush administration euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” including waterboarding. In reality those methods constituted torture, violating U.S. law and international agreements.

    • What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

      A strange thought occurred to me connecting two subjects I’ve never connected in my mind before, US Military recruiters and chuggers (charity muggers). Both home in on people they deem fits their criteria like limpet mines, bombard them with emotional (and patriotic in the case of the US military) blackmail and propaganda, then sign them up for a future commitment. The major difference is that when chuggers do it, it’s not life or limb threatening.

    • Syria clamps down on dissent with beatings and arrests

      Tensions are mounting in the Syrian capital, Damascus, after the third peaceful demonstration in three weeks was violently dispersed on Wednesday. There are increasing reports of intimidation and blocking of communications by secret services in the wake of violent unrest in neighbouring Arab countries.

      Fourteen people were arrested and several people beaten by uniformed and plainclothes police on Tuesday after about 200 staged a peaceful sit-in outside the Libyan embassy to show support for Libya’s protesters.

    • Zimbabwe charges 46 with treason for watching videos of Egypt protests

      Forty-six people in Zimbabwe have been charged with treason, and some allegedly beaten by police, after watching videos of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia

      The activists, trade unionists and students were at a meeting on Saturday titled Revolt in Egypt and Tunisia: What lessons can be learnt by Zimbabwe and Africa?, when it was raided by police who seized a video projector, two DVDs and a laptop.

  • Cablegate

    • EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: Wikileaks, Assange, And Why There’s No Turning Back

      Back in the fall of 2009, getting hold of Julian Assange wasn’t easy. The Australian founder of WikiLeaks seemed to be constantly on the move, and his email habits were unpredictable. My colleague Andrew Rasiej and I had invited him to speak at the inaugural European gathering of our Personal Democracy Forum (PdF) conference in Barcelona that November. “Micah, great!” he wrote in late October, accepting the invitation. “Currently in Laos. Denmark 18th Nov-ish. Iceland not long after. Can you send me all necessary details?”

      I wrote back right away, but a series of follow-up emails to his Sunshinepress.org account failed to get a response. The conference was just a few weeks away and we weren’t sure if one of our keynote speakers was really coming. In desperation, I went online to the WikiLeaks.org website and clicked on “live chat.” Within moments another screen opened, and I was given an anonymous user account name. I typed hello, and someone responded, telling me his name was “Daniel.” I started to explain who I was, and Daniel suggested opening a private one-on-one chat to continue the conversation. No, Julian wasn’t available right now, he told me, but he promised to relay my messages to him.

    • Where does Julian Assange go from here?

      The appeal can be on a question of law, or of fact: in other words, Julian Assange can raise legal arguments that the judge got the law wrong, or he can simply say the judge made a factual mistake – about why he ended up not being interviewed further in Sweden for instance. So it can be a wide-ranging appeal.

    • The judicial authority in Sweden -v- Julian Paul Assange

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Oil hits $103 US before retreating

      Oil prices continued their roller-coaster ride Thursday, with the North American benchmark passing above $103 US a barrel before retreating to trade lower.

      April light sweet crude rose as much as 5.4 per cent to $103.41 a barrel in electronic trading overnight, before trading at $97.15 US, down 95 cents at mid-afternoon in New York as turmoil in Libya continued.

    • Can geoengineering put the freeze on global warming?

      Scientists call it “geoengineering,” but in plain speak, it means things like this: blasting tons of sulfate particles into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth; filling the ocean with iron filings to grow plankton that will suck up carbon; even dimming sunlight with space shades.

    • Rwanda makes saving its forests a national priority

      The rolling green countryside of Rwanda’s Thousand Hills area may look fertile and flourishing, but the area desperately needs help. At the launch of the United Nations International Year of Forests, the Rwandan minister of land and the environment, Stanislas Kamanzi, announced a forest landscape restoration initiative.

    • HR1: Deaf, Dumb, and Blind on Climate Change

      Early this morning, after making an atrocious bill even worse, the House of Representatives passed H.R.1 on a vote of 235 to 189, with only three Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting no. What was supposed to be a “continuing resolution” to fund the government through the end of this fiscal year is instead an all out assault on government, and the public health safeguards most Americans want government to enforce, at the behest of big polluters and anti-science ideologues. This is probably the single most irresponsible bill I have seen either Chamber of Congress pass in the more than 20 years I have been in Washington.

    • A Republican Rampage

      The winners, instead, are corporate polluters like Big Oil, cement makers and coal companies that blow the tops off of mountains and leave the landscape in ruins. The losers are Americans everywhere who expect responsible leadership from the Congress and a decent modicum of corporate stewardship from industry. What’s happened here makes a mockery of both. It’s a national disgrace.

    • Diamond jubilee tree-planting project launched

      A Queen’s jubilee year project to plant 6 million trees across the UK has been launched.

      The princess royal will plant the first tree for the Jubilee Woods project, organised by the Woodland Trust charity.

      The project, which has the Queen’s support and the princess as patron, aims to plant the trees across the UK and involve millions of people to celebrate the Queen’s 2012 diamond jubilee.

      To mark the launch, the princess will be planting a tree and placing a personal letter of support in a specially designed Jubilee Woods time capsule at Home Farm Wood, Burkham, Bentworth, in Hampshire.

  • Finance

    • Obama to Teachers: “Drop Dead”

      Obama could simply fly into Madison, deliver a few words of support for the strikers, and assure himself of a landslide victory in 2012. But he won’t do that, because he’s not the man that people thought he was. He won’t lift a finger to help his friends even when they’re embroiled in the biggest fight of their lives. He won’t support the people who supported him.

      Obama’s message to the teachers, “Drop dead!”

    • [Ralph Nader:] Time to Topple Corporate Dictators

      All this adds to the growing sense of powerlessness by the citizenry.

    • RBS was nicely bailed out – now it’s time to bail in

      Last week, I was admonished by an Edinburgh court, having been arrested at a protest in an RBS branch in 2010. The action consisted of the “Superglue 3″ attaching ourselves to the building with glue and politely talking to customers about the bank’s role in funding climate change-inducing projects. Meanwhile a seven-piece band performed rewrites of pop songs about the issues.

    • Chart of the Day: Republican vs. Democratic Spending

      Republicans, it turns out, actually spend a bit more money on social programs than Democrats, as the green bars in the chart below show (click for a larger image). The main difference? Democrats spend it on direct programs that largely serve “the elderly, the disabled, the unemployed, and the poor…ethnic minorities, racial minorities, and single mothers.” Republicans spend it indirectly on programs that “are biased towards workers who are White, full-time, in large companies, and high-wage earners.” But spend it they do.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Why Tor is ALWAYS a good idea – Log Analysis

      So, I decided to take a look and see what was happening with the logs, so because I was bored, I decided to use Google and I typed in RCMP IP address. This turned up an ugly webpage by some group called Fathers Canada that’s barely legible. Anyway, they had an article about the RCMP being spied upon by a “cyber-stalker”.

    • 2 Tory senators charged over campaign spending

      Elections Canada has laid charges against the Conservative Party and four of its members, including two senators, over alleged violations of election spending rules.

    • Why have major newspapers ignored Buscombe’s libel payout?

      Last week, Nick Davies reported on this site that the Press Complaints Commission chair, Baroness (Peta) Buscombe, had settled a libel action brought against her by lawyer Mark Lewis.

      In a formal high court statement, she apologised to Lewis and paid him damages. The case concerned a public statement by Buscombe a year ago at a Society of Editors’ conference in which she implied that Lewis had lied about an aspect of the police investigation into the News of the World hacking scandal. That was false: he had not lied.

    • Fox News boss persuaded fellow executive to ‘lie’ to federal investigators

      The chairman of the right-wing current affairs channel, Fox News, Roger Ailes, has been named in court documents as the previously anonymous executive who allegedly tried to persuade a fellow boss at News Corporation to lie to federal investigators over a crucial Washington appointment.

      The New York Times reported court documents had become available that for the first time name Ailes as the mysterious executive involved in the allegations. The claims were initially made in November 2007 by Judith Regan, one of Rupert Murdoch’s rising stars in News Corporation until she was dismissed the previous year in a row over her decision to publish a book with OJ Simpson.

    • Coalition urged to act over lobbyists who use party groups ‘to buy influence’

      Corporations and interest groups have channelled more than £1.6m to MPs and lords in the past year through sponsorship of parliamentary groups, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

      Parliamentary reformers given access to the Guardian’s findings have called on the coalition government to take action to prevent all-party groups acting as “mere front groups for lobbyists to buy influence”.

  • Iran

    • Satellite dishes confiscated to prevent access to information

      The Iranian regime has confiscated satellite dishes in several parts of Tehran to prevent free access to information, according to reports by Hrana this week.

      The news agency said the regime’s State Security Forces (SSF) raided some apartments in western Tehran districts like Shahrak-e Gharb and Ekbatan to confiscate satellite dishes.

    • Mousavi’s apology was rejected

      The Mousavi’s official website, Kaleme.com, has published a document and called it The Charter of Green Movement Publishing this unacceptable document as the charter of the movement, has made many Iranians angry. They say: “Our martyrs have not been killed, and our prisoners have not been tortured or raped for this stupid charter or for stupid reform in this incorrigible regime.” I think they are right, the charter is unacceptable. Indeed, Mousavi showed us that we could not trust him and his team. They are unreliable. This was the last chance of Mousavi and his team to correct their mistakes, but they showed us that they want to repeat their mistakes over and over.

    • Another regime diplomat quits post

      An Iranian regime diplomat has defected from his post in Italy and is seeking political asylum in France, according to the Associated Press on Sunday.

      As an attempt to downplay the defection and prevent similar moves in the future, the faltering regime claimed in its press reports that he had merely “transferred his post.”

    • Changes in VOA Farsi

      Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a well-known Iranian film director, has said to Channel One TV that:’ Mr. Sajadi was a puppet of regime … Last year he didn’t allow that the news of the Iranian protesters were broadcasted in the proper time … the VOA’s staff were angry with him … He fired many independent reporters form VOA … He was a regime’s puppet and the regime’s lobby supported him … if the US really wants to support the protesters, they should kick him out of VOA

    • Stealing a Funeral

      Furthermore, Mr. Karrubi and Mousavi were both placed under house arrest. On February 14, the state-run television reported calm streets in big cities and business as usual. It made a passing reference to sporadic unsuccessful attempts by a few hundred agitators who had tried to march but had been dispersed for lack of sympathy from the general public.

    • The Number of Victims
    • Chants of “We have not given our dead in the hopes of compromise or praising a murderous leader” in Vali-e Asr

      Protesters were protecting themselves by hurling stones and setting trash bins ablaze. In Vanak Square, ferocious clashes took place between the youth and anti-riot forces, continuing after tear gas, was fired to the Mirdamad area and South Kazeroon Ave. Sounds of gunfire were heard frequently from this area up to Yousef Abad. In Vali-e Asr Square, protesters chanted: “We have not given our dead in the hopes of compromise or praising a murderous leader”.

  • Civil Rights

    • Mikhail Gorbachev lambasts Vladimir Putin’s ‘sham’ democracy

      Russia under prime minister Vladimir Putin is a sham democracy, Mikhail Gorbachev has said in his harshest criticism yet of the ruling regime.

      “We have everything – a parliament, courts, a president, a prime minister and so on. But it’s more of an imitation,” the last president of the Soviet Union said.

    • Russia’s chief whistleblower wants to jail the corrupt

      Alexey Navalny leaps out of his chair and draws five black circles on a whiteboard. The circles represent players in Russia’s multibillion-dollar oil industry. With boundless energy and lightning speed, he draws lines and connects the dots, telling the story of what he calls classic Russian corruption.

    • LinkedIn Blocked in China After ‘Jasmine’ Pro-Democracy Postings

      LinkedIn Corp., operator of the largest networking site for professionals, became inaccessible in China after a user posted comments that Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution should spread to the Asian country.

      The blockage of the service “appears to be part of a broader effort in China going on right now, involving other sites as well,” Hani Durzy, a spokesman for Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, said in an e-mail. The company will continue to monitor the situation, he wrote.

    • Thai PM admits British nationality

      Thailand’s prime minister has admitted for the first time that he is also a British citizen, which opponents believe makes him liable for prosecution for alleged human rights abuses during a recent crackdown on anti-government protests.

      Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva publicly acknowledged his dual nationality on Thursday during a debate in parliament. He automatically holds British citizenship because he was born in Newcastle upon Tyne to parents from a well-to-do Bangkok family. He would have to specifically renounce it to lose it.

    • PayPal Statement on Courage to Resist Situation

      Upon review, and as part of our normal business procedures, we have decided to lift the temporary restriction placed on their account because we have sufficient information to meet our statutory ‘Know Your Customer’ obligations. The Courage to Resist PayPal account is now fully operational.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • Rogers Disobeys Internet Openness Rules, Once Again Demonstrates Need for Strong Enforcement

      CRTC staff have written to Rogers Communications regarding customer complaints that the major ISP has been slowing the speeds of “time sensitive audio [and] video traffic.”

    • Say No to the GAC veto

      Tell the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that you oppose a U.S. Commerce Department proposal to give the world’s governments arbitrary power over the Internet’s domain name system.

    • If governments can block top level domains, is .gay doomed?

      The nonprofit in charge of the world’s Internet domains will meet in San Francisco next month, and plenty of eyes are nervously watching the process by which it will decide how to green light new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs)—suffixes such as “.com,” “.org,” or “.info.” The International Committee on Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN) is circulating proposals for handling the next application round.

    • Brazil Fines Man $1,800 for Sharing Wi-Fi

      National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL) fines Internet user $ 3,000 BRL ($1,797 USD) for sharing Internet connection with three other low-income neighbors. NTA says the open Wi-Fi connection made him an ISP and he lacked the proper permits.

      Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL) apparently has too much free time on its hands. Rather than focus on the larger picture of telephone and ISP pricing, access, and competition issues it’s concerned that an individual from a low-income neighborhood is sharing his Wi-Fi connection with others.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Spectrum Disorders

    • Copyrights

      • Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson

        Last week, I reported on a major Canadian lawsuit filed by 26 record labels against isoHunt. The legal action, filed in May 2010 without any press releases or public disclosure by CRIA, seeks millions in damages and an order shutting down the controversial website. At the same time as the labels filed the statement of claim, the four major labels responded to isoHunt’s effort to obtain a declaration that it operating lawfully in Canada. Their Statement of Defence (posted here – excuse the poor scan) also makes the case that isoHunt currently violates Canadian copyright law.

      • DAR.fm Starts To Disrupt What’s Left Of The Music Industry

        Michael Robertson has been throwing bombs at the music industry in the name of users for almost a decade, and today he introduced another product that’s going to drive them nuts: Dar.fm.

      • iiNet again slays Hollywood in landmark piracy case

        The giants of the film industry have lost their appeal in a lawsuit against ISP iiNet in a landmark judgment handed down in the Federal Court today.

        The appeal dismissed today had the potential to impact internet users and the internet industry profoundly as it sets a legal precedent surrounding how much ISPs are required to do to prevent customers from downloading movies and other content illegally.

      • iiNet Wins (again) Against Hollywood in Oz Appeal
      • iiNet Fights Off Hollywood, ISP Not Responsible For Online Piracy
      • Piracy once again fails to get in way of record box office

        The movie business has—yet again—run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren’t affecting box office receipts.

        Those receipts are up even as the number of people buying tickets has declined. In the US and Canadian markets, the total number of tickets sold fell by 5 percent last year, but theater owners made up for the decline by raising prices an average of 39¢. The motion picture industry would like to assure you that movies remain a very good deal.

      • Copyright Isn’t a Human Right

        Copyright = Monopoly
        Published works lie outside of an author’s human rights, so the state grants exclusive reproduction privilege — a monopoly — over the reproduction of published works. That is copyright.

        The printing monopolies predating the Statute of Anne in England were privileges granted printers, and so are even less beneficial to creators than copyright, and so not the same thing at all.

Clip of the Day

Anonymous on The Colbert Report


Credit: TinyOgg

IRC Proceedings: February 24th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 1:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log

Enter the IRC channels now

02.24.11

Links 24/2/2011: Firefox 4 Days Away, Assange Loses Case, PayPal Cuts Service to Manning

Posted in News Roundup at 3:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop training harder than you’d think

    Curiously, it may be Web 2.0 that gets around this problem. As web apps get more complex, you won’t need as many apps at the local OS level. You’ll just need a browser and whatever platform underneath. That’s the space Linux will ultimately live in, and training–at least at the OS level–may be a moot point.

    But will it be what we could call “desktop Linux”? That remains to be seen.

  • Fun with Linux: How to wipe out Windows to install Ubuntu, then decorate with a penguin

    If you’ve got some non-geek friends and relatives that need to be convinced to give Linux a try, here’s a how-to video to help. It will walk them through how to install Ubuntu to any Windows machine, to set up the fun stuff like the music store and using a dual-monitor setup — and even how to uninstall and go back to Windows (though, who would do that?). Once you’ve made them a convert, they can print out and enjoy this cute mascot penguin cut-out, too, courtesy of Aberdeen.

  • A Miniature Linux Office Solution (Mini ITX)

    In this case I chose Mandriva as it is my personal favorite and the end-user needs a relatively easy to use and configure Linux distribution.

  • Leaving Flickr Behind: Why You Should Host Your Own Photos and Why Linux Makes It so Damn Easy

    I’ve left Flickr. After many years as a loyal Flickr user, I decided not to extend my pro account and leave the popular photo sharing service altogether. Why? For starters, I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to a rather simple question: What would happen if Flickr fails? It may be difficult to imagine that Flickr would disappear, but remember that Flickr is just a business — and not a profitable one at that. And even if Yahoo! will continue supporting Flickr, what will happen if I wake up one morning and discover that my account has been deleted without any prior warning? Not that it has never happened to anyone before.

  • Desktop

    • Switching to Ubuntu 10.04 from Windows XP

      I’ve been a long-time Windows fan like the vast majority of computer users, having been introduced to the world of computers through the Microsoft marvel. But with the growing popularity of Linux flavors, aren’t open source operating systems worth giving a try?

      Ubuntu 10.04 is among the plethora of Linux distributions that you can choose from, touted to be very user-friendly and robust, especially the 32-bit version. It brings along a wave of benefits to those embarking on Operation Open Source. It’s fast and mostly reliable – it will help you out by suggesting commands to run if you’re missing an application. The installation is quick, and the boot up and shutdown are blazing fast. And importantly, like most Linux flavors, it provides a hostile environment for viruses to survive.

  • Server

    • Goodbye MS Exchange: Good Linux Email Servers

      Don’t pay top dollar for Microsoft lard when you can get the best mail servers for free. The Linux world is full of great servers, both free and with commercial support options.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Embedded Linux file system rev’d for performance

      Datalight released a new version of its Reliance Nitro file system aimed at embedded Linux devices. Reliance Nitro SDK for Linux 2.0 offers improved read and write performance, fast boot times, solid reliability, and a wide assortment of validation and testing tools, says the company.

      The Reliance Nitro SDK for Linux 2.0 is the latest in a number of Linux-compatible file system products from Datalight, including the Datalight Flash File System announced in early 2008. That product combined the Linux version of the Reliance file system with DataLight’s FlashFX Pro flash media manager and block device driver, an earlier version of the FlashFX Tera software mentioned farther below.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • digiKam Tricks 2.0 Released

        Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send me your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.

      • How to Remotely Control KTorrent

        The KTorrent web interface is very basic but gets the job done. First, open your web browser, go to the IP address or hostname of the computer running KTorrent, and add the port number to the end. For example:

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3 Almost Ready, or is It

        GNOME 3 Shell is nearing its projected released date and development snapshots have been coming from openSUSE and Fedora. GNOME Shell 2.91.6 was released today with lots of listed improvements. But not everyone is thrilled.

  • Distributions

    • Bayanihan 5 Kalumbata – A glimpse into the past

      Bayanihan is somewhere between Pardus and CentOS 5.X, when it comes to being easy to configure and use. It’s modern and archaic at the same time, a unique quality. Combined with some weird bugs and a strange choice of programs and features, Bayanihan manages to be neither the old, nostalgia-infused distro with all the functionality you need nor the ultra-modern, bleeding-edge vessel of technology adorned with retro looks and programs.

      As such, Bayanihan invalidates itself as an alternative to popular distributions you see in the top ten list on DistroWatch. Kalumbata is a weird mix of old and new that caters to no one really. I can appreciate the effort and the noble cause, but not the outcome.

      With regional-only repository, a legacy palette of programs, plus some technical voodoo difficulties with hardware and software, Bayanihan has all the relevancy of a typical 2007 distribution. Hardly a competition in the modern arena of Linux distributions.

      If you ask me, honestly, Bayanihan is a no go. It’s a thing of the past. Sweet and cuddly, KDE 3.5 is a nice touch, the programs might make you shed a tear of sorrowful joy, but overall, it’s outdated. There’s no critical incentive you should use it, for either technical or ideological reasons. Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, a bunch of others, they are all several years ahead.

      So it seems there is a good reason why you don’t see Bayanihan in the spotlight. It’s a dying star of a different era. And while it may serve you well and true, it’s time to you moved on to younger game.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Beyond FUDCon with Robyn Bergeron, Fedora Program Manager

          Robyn Bergeron: I’ve been a Linux user for a long time, though it hasn’t always been my primary OS. I remember running Slackware back in 1995, 1996, and was an on-again, off-again tinkerer through the early 2000s. My first real involvement with contributing to F/LOSS was a few years ago, when I volunteered to help out with editing papers and compiling the proceedings for the Ottawa Linux Symposium, which I did for two years before becoming involved with Fedora.

    • Debian Family

      • A response to DistroWatch “Introducing Debian GNU/Linux 6.0″

        I’m quite pleased that Mr. Smith took the time to give Debian 6.0 a real workout before writing his review. And I even understand his reservations about ” by being so general, so universal, I felt Squeeze didn’t excel at anything.”

        Maybe, Squeeze excels at being general and universal?

      • Ubuntu: there was never any love to start with

        It’s funny that seven years and a bit after Ubuntu came to life in October 2004, people still write about the project in a dreamy wide-eyed way, even mentioning the word “love” in doing so. Naive is the description that immediately springs to mind.

        Or is it that such people are willing to use any, and every, means to attack Shuttleworth simply because they don’t like him? Separating the personal from the professional has always been a major problem for those who claim to be part of the FOSS community. Especially when marketing droids are trying to pose as journalists.

        Shuttleworth is a shrewd businessman; Canonical is registered in a known tax haven, the Isle of Man. He made a few hundred million dollars by first nurturing, then building up, and finally selling a very successful business, Thawte.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • An Interview with Jane Silber

          I’m Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical. I live in London and hold dual American/British citizenship. I spell like a Brit, speak like an American, and wave my hands about like an Italian. I grew up In Springfield, Illinois and have lived in Washington DC, Nashville, and Yokohama, Japan. I moved to the UK in 2002. My background includes jobs in start-ups and large companies, in domains ranging from health risk appraisal to artificial intelligence to military command and control. I hold degrees in Math/Computer Science from Haverford College, Management of Technology from Vanderbilt University, and an MBA from Oxford University. Outside of work I enjoy holiday travel, live performances, engrossing books, good food, witty people, and new experiences.

        • Loving Ubuntu Linux

          A short list would include Debian’s continued jealousy getting in the way of co-operation between the closely related Linux distributions; countless accusations that Canonical/Ubuntu is all about promoting Ubuntu and not Linux; and that Ubuntu doesn’t contribute its fair share to the Linux kernel and other up-stream open-source programs.

          But this, this is all old news. Ubuntu has long endured these criticisms. So have the other Linux distributions.

        • Over 50 Ubuntu Based Distributions – Wow!

          Ok so I wanted to know more about the distributions that were based on Ubuntu and the Wikipedia list is pretty long.

        • First look at Ubuntu “Natty” and the state of Unity

          Though buggy and incomplete, the implementation of Unity as it stands now looks interesting. It’s unlikely to appeal to GNOME 2.x stalwarts, but it’s unclear whether GNOME 3.0 will either. It’s an interface that may appeal to non-Linux users, if Canonical can find hardware partners to ship it pre-installed.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • OSADL preps for real-time Linux conference, launches book series

      OSADL (Open Source Automation Development Lab) is calling for papers for its 13th RealTime Linux Workshop (RTLWS13) in Prague on Oct. 20-22. Also announced were an “OSADL Academic Works” book series — starting with Roland Kammerer’s “Linux in Safety-Critical Applications” — and two new academic partners, ZHAW’s InES lab in Winterthur, Switzerland, and the RealTime Systems Laboratory (RETIS) in Pisa, Italy.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source with the Home Office and the British Computing Society

    The System Integrators are perfectly happy to work with Open Source. The customer just has to ask for it. All the SIs on the panel said this. They already provide Open Source solutions to other countries, they already use Open Source software where they are providing just a service (cuts their costs and gives them more control). They just pitch proprietary stuff at procurement contracts because that is what wins them here.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome alone?

        One of the most interesting projects announced last year, for my money at least, was Google Chrome OS. This was, as you probably know, Google’s signal of intent that it was going head first into the operating system market, having found a niche in which it figured it could make an impact.

        Its thinking was smart, too. It targeted the then burgeoning netbook market, coming up with a fast, quick-booting operating system that stored everything you needed in the cloud. When it was first demonstrated, and Google showed a portable machine booting to a working desktop in under ten seconds, I wanted to get cracking with the OS right there and then.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 beta 12 now expected Monday or Tuesday

        Developers continue to fire away on new and existing bugs before issuing the first Firefox 4 Release Candidate.

      • Update: Firefox update will patch CSRF bug, Mozilla says

        Mozilla said late Wednesday that it will ship security updates to Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6 next week that will include a patch for a bug that can be exploited using a malicious Adobe Flash file.

        (Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story, published before Mozilla responded to a request for comment, said company meeting notes suggested that the Firefox security updates would not include the patch.)

        Firefox 3.5.17 and Firefox 3.6.14 will now appear Tuesday, March 1, Mozilla disclosed in meeting notes published today.

      • With Firefox 4 Days Away, Mozilla is Updating an Online Bug List Counter

        Mozilla has made a lot of changes to its procedures for shipping new versions of the uber-popular Firefox browser, including following a new, rapid release cycle, and now, the company has adopted an online bug list countdown to help mark how close the much-delayed new version of Firefox is to final form. Mozilla has targeted February for shipping Firefox 4, but a peek at the canweshipyet site shows, in real-time, that there are 13 bugs standing in the way of shipping the new version. The counter has bounced between about 22 bugs and 13 bugs for the past day or so, but the counter itself is a sign of how seriously Mozilla now takes Firefox development.

  • Databases

  • Programming

    • Cussing in Commits: Which Programming Language Inspires the Most Swearing?

      As any programmer can tell you, programming will make you swear. But did you know that writing C++ will make you swear considerably more than PHP or Python?

      Developer Andrew Vos was looking for a weekend project when he decided to grab some one million commit messages from GitHub and scan them for swear words. He limited the swearing to George Carlin’s seven dirty words and then broke down the results according to programming language. To make sure that the popularity of one language over another didn’t skew the results, Vos grabbed an equal number of commit messages per language.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • ARM Ships Billions of Chips but IDC Doesn’t Count Them

      With ARM shipping billions of units annually and approaching 100 million personal computing devices, I should think ARM will be having an impact on personal computing in 2011.

    • Samsung promises 20nm chips before 2012

      In an announcement from Samsung’s Ana Hunter, the company confirmed that it would be building 20nm chips by the second half of the year – and claimed that the process shrink will bring major improvements.

      A drop from the current 32nm and 28nm fabrication nodes used by the company will see the high-k metal gate (HKMG) technology, used to replace the traditional silicon dioxide gate dielectric in smaller nodes to reduce current leakage, introduced with the 32nm process size employed to allow the distance between components to shrink still further.

    • First Tegra 2-based Qseven module spins HD video on 5 Watts

      MSC Vertriebs announced an ARM-based Qseven module that appears to be the industry’s first such device using Cortex-A9 cores. The MSC Q7-NT2 is built around a dual-core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 290 processor, supports 1080p video, offers interfaces ranging from gigabit Ethernet to I2C, consumes only five Watts, and offers extended temperature support, says the company.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Is co-existence possible for organic and GM food producers?

      In December 2010, organic farmer Steve Marsh from Kojonup, 250km south east of Perth in Western Australia, says he found canola plants on his property.

      Tests confirmed they were genetically modified canola.

      The discovery prompted his organic certifier, the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia to suspend and subsequently remove organic accreditation from over 300 hectares of Mr Marsh’s property.

      Mr Marsh says as a result his livelihood has been ruined because he is no longer eligible for premium organic grain prices.

      He claims the plant material blew onto his property from a swathed GM canola crop grown by his neighbour, Michael Baxter. Mr Baxter has declined requests for interviews from the ABC, but it is understood that he has vowed to defend the allegation.

      Mr Marsh has engaged Perth lawyer Richard Huston to begin legal action against Mr Baxter.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Libya: “Full Range of Options”

      Let me suggest some options the USA, Canada and other countries could take:

      * Secure the borders of Libya to prevent mercenaries from entering Libya,
      * close the airspace over Libya to prevent everything but relief flights,
      * “bomb” hospitals in Libya with GPS-guided parachuted medical supplies,
      * secure beach-heads all along the Libyan coast to permit rapid influx of material and equipment for any eventuality,
      * secure airports in Libya or build landing strips as appropriate,
      * secure other critical infrastructure that might be destroyed by any “scorched earth” policy: communication, transportation, utilities and petroleum infrastructure,
      * supply communications equipment so that citizens can call directly for action in the face of violence and reporters can inform the world what is happening in Libya,
      * distribute food, water and medicines to citizens so they can remain close to home rather than going into danger,
      * resupply former units of Libya’s military to prevent the post-regime chaos seen in Iraq, and
      * dispatch forward elements to mark targets and pull the teeth of the tyrant: mercenaries, “loyal” military units, and propaganda machines.

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • It’s Time to Have a Serious Conversation About Jim Flaherty and Goldman Sachs

      Maude Barlow, with the Council of Canadians, once said that Chantel Hebert was the only progressive voice on Canadian television. The last thing I ever heard Hebert say was that she felt that Jim Flaherty was the most underrated politician on Parliament Hill.

      I have never listened to another word from her and avoid her columns. If she told me the earth was round, I would have to rethink my position. But was her remark the result of lazy journalism, or was she, like most Canadians, simply brainwashed by the millions and millions of dollars in taxpayer funded advertising?

    • Jim Flaherty, Goldman Sachs and “The Swoop and Squat”

      At the height of the housing boom, Goldman Sachs was selling billions in bundled mortgage-backed securities, while also betting against those same securities. In other words they were going to have their cake and eat it too. Cashing in on one end and cashing out on the another, under a deregulation gold mine called the credit default swap.

    • Taibbi: Why Wall Street Isn’t In Jail – Video Interview

      The US government cannot effectively deal with the financial crisis and the required credible reforms because in fixing the problems they would necessarily expose the underlying fraud, and endanger the very powerful status quo that funds them and their political campaigns.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • The Biggest Issue for Canadian Digital Policy

      As public frustration with the state of telecommunications services such as Internet access and wireless competition mounts, a relatively obscure government consultation on spectrum deserves far more attention. Last November, Industry Canada released a Consultation on a Policy and Technical Framework for the 700 MHz Band and Aspects Related to Commercial Mobile Spectrum. While the title alone is likely enough for most to look elsewhere, no issue will have a greater impact on the next 10 years of Canadian digital policy.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Trademark Wars: ChaCha, XOOM Taken to the Gauntlet

        It’s nothing new to hear about patent and trademark infringements in the Android market. Whether it be OEMs or developers, someone’s registered patent or trademark is always being infringed upon. Even Google “stole” Android at some point. That’s been settled with some ridiculous amount of money, of course.

Clip of the Day

WikiReader


Credit: TinyOgg

ES: FACEBOOK RASTREA Y LOCALIZA A TODO EL MUNDO: DE ESTA MANERA

Posted in Servers at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sneak a peek

(ODF | PDF)

Arnold Roosendaal * (translation by Eduardo Landaveri, maintainer of the Spanish portal of Techrights. The original in English is at ssrn.com)

Resumen: Numerosos sitios web han puesto en marcha el botón de Facebook “Me Gusta” -Like- pora que los miembros de Facebook compartan sus intereses, y con ello la promoción de otros sitios web o artículos de prensa. Es, por tanto, una herramienta de trabajo importante para los proveedores de contenido. Sin embargo, este artículo demuestra que la herramienta también es utilizada para colocar cookies (galletas) en el ordenador del usuario, sin importar si él usuario realmente utiliza el botón cuando visita un sitio web o no. Como modelo de negocio alternativo esto permite Facebook rastrear y localizar a los usuarios para procesar sus datos. Parece que los que no son miembros de Facebook también pueden ser rastreados a través del mencionado botón igualmente. Esto significa que los tentáculos de Facebook van mucho más allá de su propia plataforma y sus miembros. Debido a la extensa cobertura de la red con los botones “Me Gusta”, Facebook tiene una posible conección con todos los usuarios de la web. Toda actividad en la Web pueden ser vinculadas a cuentas individuales de usuarios de Facebook, o a un conjunto de datos por separado, para las personas que no son (todavía) miembros de Facebook. La recogida de datos ocultos en el comportamiento de navegación y la creación de conjuntos de datos individuales tiene implicaciones para la privacidad de los individuos. Este artículo aborda los problemas de privacidad derivados de la utilización de cookies por terceras partes, de la conectividad de la actividad en la Web y los dispositivos, mediante el proceso técnico detrás del botón “Me Gusta” Facebook como ejemplo.

Nota: Este documento es un trabajo en progreso. La versión final aparecerá más adelante.

1. Introducción

El uso de cookies y las cookies de terceros para reconocer y realizar un seguimiento y localización de los usuarios de la web no es un concepto nuevo. Por lo general, las cookies se colocan en el navegador web del usuario sin ningún tipo de visibilidad. Para permitir a terceros colocar sus cookies, ellos tienen que ser autorizados a colocar contenido en un sitio web. El contenido se solicita desde el servidor web del tercero y se entrega junto con una cookie. Cuando un sitio es visitado de nuevo, la cookie se envía junto a la solicitud de contenido. Esto permite a los proveedores de contenido “recordar” las preferencias de los usuarios de la web, tales como opciones de idioma o la historia de compras, y para proporcionar el contenido de la web de acuerdo con estas preferencias.

El seguimiento y ubicación de usuarios a través de la web es una herramienta valiosa para fines de perfilado. Sobre la base de intereses revelados por los usuarios de la web, ellos pueden ser objeto de publicidad personalizada. Las empresas que obtienen sus ingresos por publicidad dirigida tienen un interés enorme en el uso de estas técnicas. Por tanto, no es sorprendente la manera en que estas técnicas sean explotadas cada vez más y más sofisticadamente. La sofisticación también puede estar en la presentación. Por ejemplo, Facebook ofrece a los proveedores de contenido colocar un botón “Me Gusta” en su sitio web. Este mencionado botón es una herramienta que permite a los miembros de Facebook indicar que les gusta un sitio web determinado o un elemento en aquel sitio web. Al hacer clic en el botón, un enlace con el elemento se colocá en su página de perfil en Facebook. Además, el número de visitantes a los que “le gusta” algo está indicado junto al botón. Para los proveedores de contenido, el botón “Me Gusta”, puede por tanto, funcionar como una herramienta de trabajo importante. Los visitantes contribyen a atraer más visitantes a un determinado sitio web. Esto hace que sea una herramienta valiosa para los proveedores de contenido, que también es reflejado en el rápido aumento en la cobertura en la web del botón “Me Gusta”. Sin embargo, a pesar de presentarse como una opción interesante para los proveedores de contenido, el botón también se utiliza igualmente para colocar cookies, para rastrear y localizar a los usuarios de la web, independientemente de que realmente utilizen el botón o no. El comportamiento de navegación de las personas pueden conectarse a su cuenta de Facebook. Cuando un usuario no tiene cuenta de Facebook, un conjunto independiente de datos sobre su comportamiento de navegación individual puede ser creado. Cuando un usuario crea una cuenta más tarde, los datos se pueden conectar a su página de perfil recientemente creada.

En este artículo, en primer lugar daremos una breve introducción al botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook (sección 2). Luego, en la sección 3 cubriremos el proceso técnico de la colocación y sustitución de las cookies con la ayuda del mencionado botón será descrita, así como la forma como facilita la creación de perfiles. Posteriormente, se discutirá la forma en que esta práctica afecta la privacidad de los individuos (sección 4) y, por último, se elaborará una conclusión (sección 5).

2. El botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook

El botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook es una imagen que muestra un símbolo pulgar hacia arriba acompañado de la palabra “Me Gusta”. Según Facebook, el botón “Me Gusta” permite al usuario compartir su contenido con sus amigos en Facebook. Cuando el usuario hace clic en el botón “Me Gusta” en su sitio web, una historia aparece en los amigos del usuario Feeds de Noticias con un enlace a su sitio web.”1 Cualquier persona puede poner en práctica el botón en su página web, simplemente añadiendo el código que está disponible de forma gratuita. El botón puede, por tanto, ser utilizado por los proveedores de contenidos para hacer que los usuarios web promuevan contenidos, así como para crear enlaces en sus páginas de perfil en Facebook. Al hacer clic en el botón “Me Gusta”, un campo de autenticación se abre en una ventana emergente para iniciar sesión en Facebook. El inicio de una sesión resulta en la creación de un enlace en su página de perfil de Facebook. Cuando un usuario ya está conectado a Facebook la creación tiene lugar inmediatamente.

En abril de 2010, en su “f8” conferencia, Facebook anunció la Personalización Instantánea y Social Plug-ins, dos servicios que permiten a sus socios aprovechar el gráfico social – la información sobre sus relaciones en el sitio que el usuario pone a disposición del sistema – y proporcionar una canal para el intercambio de información entre Facebook y terceros. Por ejemplo, los sitios web podrían implementar un botón “Me Gusta” en sus propias páginas que permite a los usuarios compartir el contenido de ese sitio con las conexiones del usuario en Facebook.2 El valor de implementar el botón “Me Gusta” en un sitio web se hace evidente en las estadísticas. Los sitios que agregan “plug-ins sociales” de Facebook, de los cuales el botón “Me Gusta” es uno de ellos y el que se recomienda para empezar, informaron de aumentos en el tráfico de más del 200% e incluso más. Además, el tiempo empleado y el número de artículos leídos en los sitios web con los botones “Me Gusta” también se incrementó en más del 80% .3 El botón representa el 12,9% de la distribución de widgets de terceros.4 También parece que en unos meses el uso de social plug-ins ha llegado a millones de sitios.5 La tasa de penetración de el botón “Me Gusta” en los 10,000 sitios web cumbre ha alcanzado más del 4% en los primeros seis meses después de su introduction6, y es probable que su tasa de penetración seguirá creciendo de manera exponencial.

Mientras que el botón “Me Gusta” puede ayudar a los proveedores de contenido a generar tráfico para sus sitios web, también es una herramienta para los miembros de Facebook añadan información sobre sus intereses a su página de perfil personal. Por lo que esto, se ajusta perfectamente en la tendencia actual de los sitios de las redes sociales como Facebook compartan información personal. Obviamente, compartir artículos de la web es una herramienta muy útil, pues permite la conexión directa sin tener que copiar y pegar direcciones URL completa y el contenido se compone de una forma legible de forma automática.

3. Las cookies, el reconocimiento y la identificación

Como se ha indicado, hay numerosas terceras partes que entregan el contenido de sitios web y ponen cookies en esos lugares. Por lo general, la función de estos terceros es proporcionar a los proveedores de sitio web con información sobre el número de visitantes y que elementos de una página web atrajeron la mayor atención. Los terceros, por lo tanto, también ofrecen un servicio para el proveedor de la página web. Estos servicios son proporcionados directamente por los terceros lo que también implica que tienen que recibir la información de los visitantes directamente. Esto se facilita de forma automática, por que una parte del contenido se entrega desde los servidores de las terceras partes y que puede ser enviado junto con la cookie. Un usuario de la web usualmente no suele estar consciente de ello. Él escribe la dirección URL de la página web que quiere visitar y la página se carga. Esa carga de la página implica numerosas peticiones HTTP para el contenido de los servidores de los sitios web visitados y los servidores de los terceros, a menudo varias terceras partes es un proceso que se lleva a cabo entre bastidores. Más popularmente dicho: ¡es aquí donde sucede el truco!

Una cookie se coloca en la computadora de los usuarios del web a través de su navegador. Sólo el servidor desde donde se envió la cookie tiene acceso a la cookie, por lo que cada cookie se conecta a un servidor web único. No es el caso de que el proveedor de un sitio web tenga acceso a todas las cookies colocados por terceros a través de su página web. Una vez que una cookie está disponible en el ordenador del usuario, esta se enviará junto con la solicitud HTTP en cada solicitud posterior por contenido desde el servidor que instaló la cookie. La petición HTTP incluye también datos sobre el remitente, que es el sitio en el que su contenido será mostrado. Dado que los datos referentes son siempre incluido, los terceros pueden seguir exactamente los sitios que un usuario ha visitado y cuándo. El contenido es necesario cuando se carga la página, así que para ser seguido o localizado, es irrelevante si un usuario hace clic en realidad en un fragmento de contenido o no.

Ahora veamos el botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook. Esta es también una pieza de contenido de terceros. No es que el proveedor de la página web directamente coloca una imagen de este botón en su página web. De hecho, el botón es un pedazo de código HTML que incluye la solicitud al servidor de Facebook para poner la imagen cuando la página web se carga. Esto implica que el botón se puede utilizar para configurar las cookies de terceros o para reconocer también. Unos pocos escenarios diferentes se pueden distinguir. Los escenarios han sido probados en un experimento práctico en Techcrunch.com, CNN.com, y Gizmodo.com.

3.1 El usuario web que tiene una cuenta en Facebook

La primera opción es un escenario en el que el usuario de la web tiene una cuenta de Facebook. Cuando se crea la cuenta, Facebook emite una cookie que contiene un identificador de usuario único. Esta cookie facilita la visualización del nombre del usuario en el campo de entrada en visitas recurrentes. Al acceder a Facebook desde otro dispositivo, una cookie temporal se expide, que es sustituida por una cookie con el mismo ID después de acceder a la cuenta. De esta manera, los diferentes dispositivos se pueden conectar a una misma cuenta, y así a un usuario único, mediante el uso de un cookie de la misma identificacón. Cada vez que el usuario quiere visitar el sitio web de Facebook, la cookie es enviada junto con la solicitud HTTP a el sitio web de Facebook. Como resultado, Facebook ya sabe quién quiere iniciar una sesión antes de la entrada real haya tenido lugar.

Sin embargo, la cookie no sólo se envía a los servidores de Facebook cuando un miembro quiere iniciar la sesión, sino en cada ocasión donde el contenido, como el botón “Me Gusta” tenga que ser suministrado por los servidores de Facebook (fig. 1). Por lo tanto, cada vez que un sitio web que incluye el botón “Me Gusta” es visitado Facebook recibe la información sobre el usuario, incluyendo su identificación única, a través de la cookie Cuando el usuario hace click en el botón, tiene que proporcionar sus datos de inicio de sesión en Facebook y un mensaje sobre el “Me Gusta” es publicado en su página de perfil.

Puesto que los datos sobre el usuario son enviados a Facebook, independientemente de si el botón “Me Gusta” es hecho clic o no, los usuarios a menudo no son conscientes de este hecho. Sin embargo, la cookie contiene el identificador de usuario único y con ello facilita la información sobre su comportamiento de navegación sea conectado a su cuenta. A pesar de que el usuario no está involucrado, Facebook puede recoger muchos más datos individuales a continuación, que los datos disponibles en la página de perfil solamente. 

GET /plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FGizmodo&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=200&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=21 HTTP/1.1 
Host: www.facebook.com 
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10 
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 
Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5 
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate 
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 
Keep-Alive: 115 
Connection: keep-alive 
Referer: http://gizmodo.com/ 
Cookie: datr=yjPATCXPQuDBLU_J5ZfRsJpd; lu=TgbyaYN2Obo-F4fEBiQTGtwQ; locale=en_GB; x-referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fhome.php%23%2Fhome.php; cur_max_lag=20; c_user=100001XXXXXXXXX; sct=1287731574; sid=0; xs=55dcbdfe4719c2693d477d0c0dd83ab6 
Cache-Control: max-age=0

Fig. 1: La solicitud HTTP GET para el botón “Me Gusta” en Gizmodo.com, incluyendo la cookie con el ID de usuario (anónimizado por el autor con XXXXX)

En este escenario, existe un vínculo entre el usuario de Internet y Facebook, porque hay una cuenta. Ahora, vamos a considerar un escenario en el que no existe ninguna relación.

3.2. El usuario de la web que no tiene una cuenta de Facebook

Cuando un usuario no tiene una cuenta en Facebook, no existe una cookie y ID de usuario disponible. En este caso, una visita a Techcrunch.com incluye una solicitud HTTP GET para el botón “Me Gusta”. Sin embargo, cuando el botón es suministrado no existe cookie emitida. Por lo tanto, parece que el propio botón “Me Gusta” no se utiliza para emitir las cookies. Sin embargo, cuando un sitio es visitado, incluye Facebook Connect (por ejemplo Gizmodo.com) esta aplicación emite una cookie (fig. 2). A partir de ese momento, las visitas a otros sitios web que muestren el botón “Me Gusta” resulta en una petición del botón “Me Gusta” desde el servidor de Facebook incluyendo la cookie. Una parte importante del proceso depende de visitar un sitio que ha puesto en marcha Facebook Connect. La posibilidad de visitar un sitio de estos es considerable. A partir de un año de su lanzamiento en diciembre de 2008, Facebook Connect se ha utilizado en casi 1 millón de sitios web, y en marzo de 2009 más de 40 millones de visitantes únicos de Facebook Connect implementaciones se registraron.7 Aumenta el número de implementaciones de manera exponencial, lo que la probabilidad de pasar por un sitio web que lo implemente esta creciendo cada vez más grande y a un ritmo más rápido también.

Como se ha indicado, después de visitar un sitio Web en el que Facebook Connect se ha implementado, la solicitud del botón “Me Gusta” incluye una cookie. Esta cookie tiene una fecha de caducidad de dos años desde el momento en que se emitió. Sin embargo, al navegar a través de sitios web, cookies adicionales pueden ser colocadas en el ordenador del usuario y estas se pueden agregar más adelante en nuevas solicitudes. No todos las cookies se utilizan de esta manera. Por ejemplo, una cookie emitida a través de la entrada externa estado de plug-in no está incluido en solicitudes posteriores.

Sobre la base de la cookie, el total comportamiento web de un usuario individual puede ser seguido. Cada sitio que incluye algún tipo de contenido de Facebook iniciará una interacción con los servidores de Facebook, revelando con ello la información sobre los sitio web visitados, junto con las cookies.

1. Set-Cookie: datr = ckviTDm3989eNbvw6xMhAWle; expires = Wed, 15-Nov-2012 09:14:26 GMT; path = /; domain =. facebook.com

2. Set-Cookie: datr = ckviTC8tNJ-1ZKqCu_SrIga7; expires = Wed, 15-Nov-2012 09:14:26 GMT; path = /; domain =. facebook.com

Fig. 2. Una cookie emitida a través de estado de Facebook entrada externa (1) y uno a través de Facebook Connect (2) en Gizmodo.com.

3.3. El usuario de la web se convierte en un miembro de Facebook

Es posible que un usuario de la web ya tiene un conjunto personal de datos recogidos por Facebook, con base en el mecanismo descrito anteriormente. La pregunta es qué sucede cuando el usuario crea una cuenta de Facebook. En este caso, primero tiene que ir a la página principal de Facebook (la página de inicio de sesión). La cookie que el usuario tiene en su ordenador se envía a Facebook en la solicitud de la página web para ser cargada. El servidor responde y emite un cookies nuevas. Estas nuevas cookies son cookies temporales o cookies de sesión. Cuando la cuenta es creada, un número de identificación único es emitida y enviada en una cookie. La conexión entre esta cookie ID y la cookie vieja se hace entre bastidores por los servidores de Facebook. Esto significa que toda la información histórica de el usuario se puede conectar a la recién creada cuenta de Facebook. A partir de este momento, todas las solicitudes posteriores por contenido de Facebook van acompañadas de la cookie incluyendo el ID de usuario único.

Cuando todas las cookies se eliminan, el proceso comienza nuevamente desde el principio cuando Facebook Connect coloca una nueva cookie cuando un sitio que tenga Facebook Connect en su contenido es visitado. Sin embargo, desde el momento en que una persona accede a su cuenta de Facebook, o se conecta a esta cuenta haciendo clic en el botón “Me Gusta”, y proporcionando su nombre de usuario y su contraseña, esta cookie se sustituye por una cookie que contiene el identificador de usuario único que pertenece a esa cuenta.

Las cookies son utilizadas para el reconocimiento. Los usuarios de la Web pueden ser reconocido cada vez que visitan un sitio con un fragmento de contenido de Facebook. Los miembros de Facebook son identificados como los titulares de cuentas individuales, porque la cookie incluye su número de identificación único de usuario. Cuando se utilizan diferentes dispositivos para acceder a Facebook, como una computadora en casa, un ordenador portátil y un teléfono inteligente, todos estos dispositivos se reconocen como pertenecientes a la misma persona. Por lo tanto, toda la interacción web desde estos diferentes dispositivos se conectan también. Las personas que no tienen una cuenta de Facebook son reconocidos como tales. Su comportamiento de navegación, sin embargo, no es relacionado con una cuenta de Facebook. Además, este reconocimiento es automatizado y separado por cada dispositivo individual. Dado que no existe identificador de usuario único en la cookie como resultado de una sesión en Facebook, los diferentes dispositivos no pueden conectarse únicamente sobre la base de las cookies. Sin embargo, los dispositivos individuales pueden ser muy confiables, a pesar de que puedan ser utilizado por personas diferentes. Cada vez más dispositivos, como ordenadores portátiles y teléfonos inteligentes, se vuelven personales y son generalmente utilizados por un solo individuo. Esto implica que la información recopilada sobre la base de las cookies y los resultados de la navegación de el comportamiento de un perfil muy personal. Obviamente, Facebook puede usar esto para servir a sus miembros anuncios personalizados. Lo más probable, la información recogida sobre el comportamiento de navegación de los no miembros se puede utilizar para obtener una muestra más grande para el perfilado y fines de orientación.

El botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook no es el único botón que aparece con frecuencia en los sitios web para facilitar el intercambio o la promoción de contenidos. Otros ejemplos son el botón Tweet de Twitter, el botón de Digg, y el Buzz de Google. Hay, sin embargo, algunas diferencias. Como se describe anteriormente, Facebook Connect es el sistema que actualmente emite una cookie la primera vez. A partir de ese momento, la cookie es enviada junto con todas las peticiones de contenidos HTTP, así también cuando el botón “Me Gusta” tiene que ser cargado en una página. Por lo tanto, un sistema adicional se utiliza para iniciar el intercambio de cookies. Twitter, por ejemplo, no tiene ese sistema. El botón Tweet no siempre se envía una cookie cuando se solicita el botón de los servidores de Twitter. Esto sólo es el caso cuando alguien ha visitado la página principal de Twitter, a continuación, recibe una cookie que se utiliza en futuras interacciones con los servidores, de manera similar a la del botón “Me Gusta”. No es necesario iniciar una sesión o incluso tener una cuenta en Twitter. Una diferencia (pequeña pero importante) con el botón “Me Gusta” es que por lo menos puede haber algún tipo de vínculo a Twitter, ya que el usuario de la web ha visitado este sitio web. En Facebook, esto no es necesario en absoluto. Esto implica que las personas que eligen no participar en Facebook son todavía un objeto seguimiento y localización de parte de Facebook. Cuando alguien no se conecta a Facebook, Facebook hace la conexión.

Otra diferencia importante es que Facebook puede conectar el comportamiento de navegación con cuentas del usuario. Estas cuentas son, por lo general, bastante ricas en lo que se relaciona a la información divulgada, pero la explotación del botón “Me Gusta” por Facebook hace que mucha más información se recopile sobre miembros individuales. A continuación esa información es divulgada en su página de perfil personal. Así, las personas que tienen una cuenta, pero no quieren revelar mayor información acerca de sí mismos, todavía son perfilados de manera más amplia. El comportamiento de navegación de los usuarios revela mucha información sobre sus intereses personales, y esta información también puede ser recogida por Facebook y conectado a su cuenta individual. Al final, la conciencia en la divulgación de información, ya sea por no participar en Facebook o en caso de divulgación muy limitada de información personal, no es suficiente para escapar de los tentáculos de Facebook.

4. Implicaciones de perdida de privacidad

La forma en que Facebook utiliza el botón “Me Gusta” para recoger información sobre el comportamiento de navegación de las personas tiene claras implicaciones para la privacidad. Aunque es difícil dar una definición clara de privacidad, a pesar de que se han hecho varios intentos para describir el concepto8, algunos aspectos son ampliamente reconocidos como esenciales en este sentido. Los dos aspectos más destacados son la autodeterminación informativa y la integridad contextuales. 9 Estos se reflejan en las normas sobre protección de datos personales por medio de requisitos tales como la minimización de los datos, la especificación de propósitos, el consentimiento informado del interesado, y los derechos de los interesados en su acceso. El objetivo de estos requisitos es limitar el acceso a los datos personales lo menos posible y proporcionar a las personas con algunos instrumentos para controlar el acceso y uso de sus datos personales. En relación con la autodeterminación informativa, el individuo debe ser capaz de decidir qué datos se dan a conocer a quién y con qué propósito. El aspecto de la integridad contextual significa que los datos tienen que ser tratados de acuerdo con las normas aplicables al contexto en el que los datos fueron revelados. Además, los datos no deben ser transferidos a otro contexto sin el consentimiento previo de la persona.

Ahora, al considerar la situación del botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook, estos requisitos básicos son violados. En primer lugar, la recolección de datos se lleva a cabo sin que los usuarios de la web sean conscientes de ello. Como resultado, no puede haber consentimiento para la recolección de datos. Posiblemente, los miembros de Facebook estén de acuerdo con esto, al aceptar los términos y condiciones al registrarse en este sitio de red social. Los no miembros, sin embargo, no pueden estar de acuerdo con estos términos y condiciones, y están sometidos a la recolección de datos por su mera utilización del Internet. En segundo lugar, los efectos exactos de la recolección de datos no son claros y sus límites no están definidos también. Cabe esperar que Facebook utilize esos datos para los anuncios orientados en su sitio web. Los datos de las personas que no son miembros pueden ser utilizados para tener una muestra más grande. Sin embargo, estas personas no pueden ser objeto de los estos anuncios, ya que no están visitando el sitio web de Facebook. Por último, los interesados no pueden utilizar sus derechos de acceso para revisar los datos y pedir la corrección o eliminación de éstos.

En el argumento expuesto anteriormente, los datos fueron considerados como datos personales en el sentido de la legislación de protección de datos. Para los datos pertenecientes a los miembros de Facebook esto fácilmente se puede defender. El número de identificación único de usuario que pertenece al perfil personal de sus miembros se incluye en la cookie y se envía a los servidores de Facebook en la solicitud HTTP.10 Incluso cuando Facebook diga no conectar los datos con el perfil individual, los datos tienen que ser considerados datos personales, ya que para determinar si un partido es capaz de vincular los datos a un individuo identificable, todos los medios disponibles para esa parte tienen que ser tomados en cuenta. Facebook tiene claramente los datos de usuario y números de identificación, por los que se pueden vincular los datos a un individuo identificable.

Para los datos pertenecientes a usuarios de la web que no tienen una cuenta de Facebook, el argumento es un poco más difícil. Sin embargo, un extenso conjunto de datos puede contener una gran cantidad de información que claramente indican quién es el individuo, o al menos crear una imagen detallada de las preferencias e intereses individuales. Como resultado, los conjuntos de datos se vuelven cada vez más personales y facilitan la individualización. Además, hay que tener en cuenta que los dispositivos se vuelven más y más personales. Con el creciente uso de ordenadores portátiles y de los teléfonos inteligentes, estos no son tan compartidos por diferentes usuarios como fue el caso hace un par de años atrás, cuando el ordenador personal estaba sirviendo a familias enteras. Cuando un usuario de la web más adelante decide crear una cuenta de Facebook los datos están vinculados a dicha cuenta y son sin duda los datos personales.

Una preocupación más importante es el proceso detrás de el botón “Me Gusta” y la forma en que se presenta el botón. Si bien se ofrece como una herramienta para los propietarios de sitios web para implementar características sociales y con ello atraer a más visitantes, hay un gran interés en Facebook por implementar el botón en tantos sitios como sea posible. Si el botón se utiliza realmente por sus miembros es de menor importancia, para los primeros (propietarios de sitios web) porque los datos sobre el comportamiento de navegación se comunican a Facebook todos modos. Sin embargo, la preocupación más importante es que los usuarios de la web son de alguna manera inducidos al error. Debido a la forma en que el botón se presenta, los usuarios web, sólo esperan tener los datos transferidos al usar el botón. Que estos datos se transfieran incluso cuando no se haga clic sobre el botón es difícil de imaginar para el usuario ordinario de la web. Además, los usuarios web que no tienen ninguna conexión con Facebook, de nínguna manera esperan a que sus datos transferidos a este sitio de red social. Como resultado, las personas que eligen no participar en el sitio de red social aún está conectados a este sitio web.

5. Conclusión

En este artículo, el botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook se discutió como un ejemplo de una cookie de terceros que se aprovecha de una manera subrepticia. El botón se presenta, como una herramienta de trabajo valiosa para los titulares del sitio web y proveedores de contenido. Sin embargo, el botón es utilizado para recopilar datos detallados sobre el comportamiento de navegación de los internautas individuales, sin su conocimiento ni autorización. Estos datos se conectan a la página de perfil de Facebook o son recolectados como extra datos. Al utilizar cookies y los números de identificación únicos, Facebook tiene una posible relación con cada usuario de la web y hacer un seguimiento y rastrear su comportamiento individual. Esta práctica plantea problemas de privacidad y conflictos con la autodeterminación informativa de los internautas individuales. Facebook Rastrea y Localiza a Todo el Mundo: De Esta Manera. █

* Candidate a Doctor e Investigador, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

1 Los desarrolladores de Facebook, “El Botón “Me Gusta”” (2010), disponible en
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like (consultado el 26 Nov 10).

2 D Boyd and E Hargittai, “Configuración de privacidad de Facebook: ¿A quién le importa?” (2010) 15 First Monday 8.

3 Facebook los medios de comunicación, “El Valor de un Liker” (2010) disponible en:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-media/value-of-a-liker/150630338305797 (consultado el 26 Nov 10).

4 Construido Con Facebook, ” Estadísticas del Uso del botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook” (2010), disponible en
http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Facebook-Like (consultado el 26 de noviembre 10).

5 J Constine, “Facebook dice” Likers “Haga clic en Enlaces a sitios web externos 5,4 veces más” (2010), disponible en
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/09/29/facebook-stats-likers/ (consultado el 26 de noviembre 10).

6 Construido Con Facebook, ” Estadísticas del Uso del botón “Me Gusta” de Facebook” (2010), disponible en
http://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Facebook-Like (consultado el 26 de noviembre 10).

7 K Burbary, “Las Cinco razones Como Las Empresas Deben Integrar los Medios Sociales de Comunicación con Facebook Connect” (2009), disponible en
http://www.kenburbary.com/2009/08/five-reasons-companies-should-be-integrating-social-media-with-facebook-connect/ (consultado el 26 de noviembre 10).

8 Por ejemplo D J Solove, “Conceptualización de Privacidad” (2002) 90 4 revisar la ley de California 1087; DJ Solove, “Una taxonomía de Privacidad” (2006) 154 de la Universidad de Pennsylvania revisión de la ley 3 y, WA padre, “La privacidad, la moral y la ley” (1983) 12 Filosofía y Asuntos Públicos de 4 269.

9 H Nissenbaum, “”La privacidad como la integridad del contexto” (2004) 79 Revista de Derecho de Washington 119.

10 En contraste con lo argumentado por una portavoz de Facebook, quien dijo que la identificación se basa en la dirección IP y el navegador del usuario de la web (FUERA DE LA LEY Noticias, “NHS criticado por compartir datos de su sitio web con Facebook” (2010), disponible en http: / / www.out-law.com/page-11576 (consultado el 26 de noviembre 10)). Sin embargo, como puede verse en la figura. 1, la identificación se incluye. Simplemente no es que la cookie original de usuario-ID es enviada en forma conjunta.

Novell: Pushing Proprietary and Paying Microsoft for Free

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

BSoD for Novell

Summary: Novell is reducing people’s freedom and helps Microsoft impose a patent tax on software which is free/libre

NOVELL has always been a proprietary software vendor. It still is, but some of its proprietary offerings depend on Free software which is developed from the outside, without Novell’s investment. For instance, for those who want RHEL but also want to please Microsoft there is the ‘knockoff’ called SLES, which Microsoft takes/has commissions on. Novell is giving Microsoft’s ally, SAP, a Microsoft-friendly RHEL that pays Microsoft for alleged patent violations which were never proven. That’s Novell role and that’s why Microsoft has been sponsoring Novell for over 4 years (there are more reasons like OOXML and Moonlight). To quote:

Novell is enhancing its partnership with SAP with an expanded Linux offering for SAP applications.

Josh Dorfman, director of alliance marketing at Novell, told InternetNews.com that the new version of SLES for SAP Applications is based on SLES 11.

SAP’s portfolio is also RHEL-certified, but ever since Novell and Microsoft became allies, SAP has been enjoying a sort of relationships triangle.

If one looks at Novell news in general, it’s mostly about more proprietary software. Even BrainShare 2011, which Ron Hovsepian says will take place, is mostly about proprietary software. Rather often we just find that Novell uses SLES as a platform on which to sell its own proprietary software, so what good is Novell? There is of course the OpenSUSE project which still has some articles about it [1, 2], but that too is being neglected by Novell and abandoned by volunteers (they don’t want to carry water for AttachMSFT).

Over at YouTube, there are new videos of Novell promoting SUSE using Microsoft capabilities like Mono Extension (video with Windows Vista), proprietary software like ZENworks (it is also promoted for the Microsoft side of course) and the proprietary Novell PlateSpin (Forge) or even GroupWise. Here it is:

There are also videos about the proprietary IDM4, e.g. “IDM4: What is Novell Analyzer?” (Japanese). There are two more of these and also “The Lord of the Files” [1, 2, 3]. Here is part 1:

This basically promotes Novell Vibe, which also spreads proprietary problems. Why are some people still characterising Novell as an “open source” company? It’s not. █

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