Two of the four robots inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame on Oct. 23 ran embedded Linux. Aldebaran Robotics’ humanoid, partially open source Nao robot, known for its use in RoboCup robot soccer competitions, won in the Education & Consumer category. And iRobot’s PackBot remote sensing robot, which runs proprietary Linux, took the Industrial & Service award.
While it hasn’t been a news item for a couple months, a group of developers are still hard at work to advance the LLVM/Clang compiler and the Linux kernel to a point where this alternative compiler to GCC can be used for building the Linux kernel.
Going back two years ago when a concerted effort began to build the Linux kernel with LLVM’s Clang compiler. At the time a number of patches were needed to both LLVM/Clang and the Linux kernel itself plus there were lots of broken parts. Patches are still needed, but more of the Linux kernel is properly working and it’s an easier process than it once was.
With 2D color tiling enabled by default in the R600 Gallium3D Radeon open-source driver as of this week, here are new benchmarks showing off the OpenGL performance impact of the 1D and 2D tiling methods for this common open-source AMD Linux graphics driver.
With the recent release of Wayland 1.0, here’s a visualization that looks back on the development of Wayland/Weston going back to 2008 when it was born as a small project by Kristian Høgsberg at Red Hat.
After being reminded about Gource from the libvirt 1.0 release article this week, I decided to apply Gource to the Wayland Git tree followed by the Weston reference compositor.
The visualization of Wayland’s development begins in 2008 when Wayland was born as a small personal project of Kristian Høgsberg. At the time he was working at Red Hat and this was just a side-project, before being hired by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center to work on Wayland full-time where there is also numerous other developers now also dedicated to this X11-alternative.
Writing is one of the essential skills in modern society. Being able to communicate effectively is paramount both at work and at home. It makes your thinking visible to others, and is the main way in which work, learning, and intellect is judged by others.
Few days back we reported that Linux Game Publishing is planning to bring all games in their catalog to Ubuntu Software Center and Desura. Some of their games like Sacred Gold and Majesty have already been released in these distribution services.
Few days back we reported that Linux Game Publishing is planning to bring all games in their catalog to Ubuntu Software Center and Desura. Some of their games like Sacred Gold and Majesty have already been released in these distribution services.
Now RuneSoft, another company that specializes in porting games for Linux, is planning to bring their games to Desura. Alongside their own published games, they have also ported games like Software Tycoon and Knights and Merchants: The Shattered Kingdom for Linux Game Publishing.
He’s unhappy with the second part–retorting that you can’t attribute a trend toward extreme weather to climate change. But it’s actually the first part that’s most obviously problematic: Contrary to Kolbert, it’s possible to attribute every weather-related event to climate change.
Just as another year is passing by and summer is on its way, KDE Brazil gathered and fled south, just like migratory birds. Dragons are like birds, you know? Konqi the KDE Dragon is a little bigger than a bird, but he still has wings. We all had a common destination in this trip, the beautiful Itaipu, the biggest water-powered power plant in the Americas. (It used to be the biggest in the world, but a bigger one was built in Asia last year.)
That’s a question the GNOME project would do well to contemplate. The once mighty Linux desktop has stumbled and looks like it might be poised to come crashing down after the release of GNOME 3.
The Fedora Linux developers have decided to, yet again, delay the release of Fedora 18′s Beta by another week. But, by taking a week out of the beta test period, they still plan to make a final release on 11 December. The decision to take a week out of the schedule has been made to avoid overrunning into the Christmas holiday period.
The statistics alone for the Norfolk Makerfaire are impressive alone. They had 46 tables on display (including Fedora), 1300-1400 attendees, and they issued one Band-Aid over the course of the day. When put in perspective that it was the first faire put on by members of 757 Labs, they are even more impressive.
Through improving the publicly available Ubuntu Linux documentation and reaching out to new developers — along with existing Windows developers that may now be thinking of targeting Ubuntu as their next supported platform — the Linux OS hopes to increase its developer and application count.
XZ compressed packages have been used for a while by various distributions, including the Gnome repositories, but Ubuntu’s developers are still reticent about switching to another compression.
It’s been a big year for Canonical and Ubuntu, with big releases and lots of controversy highlighting the last six or so months. The company is steaming ahead with its plans though, and has announced that they’re joining the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG).
I’ve been reading the Microsoft Surface RT reviews, and while the Surface Pro x86 is really the one everyone should judge the line on, they are pretty much the same when it comes to the Windows RT software. If you don’t know the difference between Windows RT and full Windows 8 (which will be on the Pro) it’s basically this – Windows 8 runs millions of PC programs, Windows RT does not.
After releasing plans for the ARMv8 64-bit micro architecture a year ago, UK-based semiconductor developer ARM has now announced actual implementations: the Cortex-A57 and the Cortex-A53. Both implementations can be used on their own or work together according to the big.LITTLE processing concept to increase chip efficiency when processor loads are low. The new CPU cores will initially target highly integrated server SoCs and can be combined with CoreLink components; this allows multiple chips or CPU cores to be linked together tightly and coherently. Powerful and energy-efficient cluster interconnects are expected to be pivotal for the future success of certain microprocessors.
As the ARM architecture prepares for a future not only powering consumer devices but also driving a new generation of power-sipping high-density enterprise servers, Linaro, the not-for-profit group created to develop open source software for ARM, has announced the creation of an enterprise group to help drive forward collaboration in the new space.
If you’re looking for a creative use of a Raspberry Pi, or maybe just want to get your retro game on, this DIY coffee table arcade machine is perfect for you. You’ll need some supplies, but Instructables user grahamgelding will show you how it’s done.
A British project to design and sell a self-assembly arcade cabinet for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer has won backing on Kickstarter, just days after the site opened up to donations from the UK.
Dawati was an interesting desktop shell for the Tizen operating system that was pulled from the MeeGo project, but work on the project has more or less been halted for the past six months.
Tizen is still around with the Tizen 2.0 Alpha from September that’s expected to be officially released in December, but the Dawati Shell hasn’t seen real activity since April of this year.
Asus CFO told The Wall Street Journal late Tuesday that the Nexus 7, Google’s well-received, affordable 7-inch Android tablet was nearing 1 million in sales per month, having picked up the pace considerably over the last month in particular. Chang noted that unit sales rose from roughly 500,000 around the time of its introduction in June/July, and rose steadily after that. Tablet sales for Asus beat analyst expectations, likely as a result of the Google-branded Nexus device, which got an update earlier this week in terms of base storage specs at both price points.
Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ finally has 3 percent usage share in its sights, but Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ continues to gain ground faster, currently powering more than a quarter of Android devices.
Over 300 Android enthusiasts got into a huddle this week, discussing, debating, writing code and sharing geek wisdom on Google’s Open Source mobile operating platform, Android.
Organised by HasGeek, the second edition of the two-day conference, Droidcon India, was held at the MLR Convention Centre, Whitefield. Participants included cross-platform mobile app developers, Android developers, enterprises developing products and services for the Android platform, and front-end designers and engineers.
This week, Google announced a new lineup of devices that would be running its Android OS, Jelly Bean version 4.2. Those new devices are a phone, the Nexus 4, and a 10-inch tablet, called the Nexus 10. I’ve had a chance to play with both devices, specifically the Nexus 10, and I was actually surprised with how the device has fit into my daily routine.
The problem is that people often take what writers say as fact without realizing that there is a lot of intentional disinformation being used to gain a certain objective. Sometimes the author is not spreading disinformation, but putting information in the wrong context to get the desired result. In the old days, news used to be disseminated by journalists who were trained to at least look objective. Now, any skillful writer has to power to inform or misinform people.
In a previous post I looked at how LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats, claiming to have far more users than it actually has. Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives were peddling anything other than the plain, honest truth. No one seemed to noticed that the claims did not pass the” sniff test”. No one investigated more deeply. Until now. I hope that after reading these posts that you, gentle reader, will exercise your brain the next time you read a press release or blog post from LibreOffice, and try harder to separate fact from fiction. It will not be easy.
Maia is a colony management simulator for Windows, Mac, and Linux from indie developer Simon Roth. Launched on Kickstarter the day the service became open to projects based in the UK – October 31st – the game has already received £26,721 over 1,500 pledges at the time of writing. With a goal of £100,042 to be pledged by November 28th, that means the game is already 27% funded.
DragonFlyBSD 3.2 brings kernel scheduler improvements, updates to the GCC compiler, and a port of the FreeBSD USB stack. It’s the kernel work though that’s interesting since in multi-threaded benchmarks it has been shown to do much better than DragonFlyBSD 3.0 and to compete with Scientific Linux 6.2.
I have recently been working on RaspberryPi GNU sipwitch servers. I actually have two things in mind for this. The first is a simple and complete stand-alone secure free software voip “switch” anyone could deploy and use, much like a FreedomBox for VoIP, as a kind of wallwort with ethernet you can plug into any router. A low cost and general purpose secure VoIP server does I think have appeal, and producing complete pre-configured and assembled servers would certainly be more interesting than selling project t-shirts. The second idea is a sipwitch VoIP public wifi access point to enable anonymous secure calling, like pictured here.
Marcin Jakubowski dreams of living off the grid. Over the past few years, he’s been working on a set of 50 machines he believes necessary to found and sustain an independent, modern community. He wants to “take everything that civilization has learned to date” and use it create a blueprint for a “Global Village Construction Set” that others can use to follow in his footsteps. His Factor e Farm has already developed and built a tractor, brick press, table saw, and bread oven, as well as many other machines. The farm hopes to have the complete set of 50 ready in 2015.
ESL, the Embedded Systems Language, is a new programming language intended for embedded/small systems and its compiler was implemented atop the LLVM infrastructure.
About a week before election day, a young girl, maybe 10 years old, confronted Colorado House candidate Sal Pace in a pew at his Pueblo church. “She said, ‘Is it true that you want to cut my grandmother’s Medicare?’” Pace remembers.
Back in 2000, Republican election officials in Florida led by then-Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris kicked nearly 60,000 mostly African American voters off the rolls just ahead of the election.
They said that these people – who comprised 3% of the entire African American electorate in Florida – had been convicted of felonies and were thus ineligible to vote.
Earlier this week, ThinkProgress released internal documents from the Romney campaign detailing how it is training poll watchers to mislead voters in Wisconsin. Now, according to new documents, Wisconsin may not be the only state where Romney’s campaign is equipping volunteers with deceptive information.
With Election Day on the horizon, most voters have settled on their choice for the oval office. But let’s not forget about the all the other choices on the ballot, many of which will have a great affect on the lives and livelihoods of Americans — Congressional and State representatives, local officials, and referenda.
The just-launched Windows 8 has been nothing short of polarizing, in both the online community and users at large. But we can all agree it’s new, and a little bit confusing. Google wants to help — help you get your old Google back, anyway.
After using a Surface tablet, it became crystal clear that the Surface is really an Office appliance, not a tablet à la the iPad. But it’s not a very good Office appliance. One reason is that the hardware doesn’t work well for Office, even with the bundled keyboard cover, because the Office apps are nearly unusable with the touchscreen and just so-so with the keyboard’s trackpad. You’ll want a laptop’s superior input hardware if you do a lot of Office work. Even then, you’ll suffer from the poor Windows touch environment, where text selection is difficult, gestures are limited, and the heavy reliance on menus is interruptive.
Over the last decade, judges have repeatedly told torture victims that they don’t have the right to a day in court when they seek compensation. Even when victims have substantial publicly available evidence to support their claims, our government and its private contractors have remained above the law.
Under most circumstances, these plaintiffs would have their day in court. Our constitutional and civil rights demand that. But when it comes to national security, the Bush and Obama administrations asked courts to toss these cases, even before plaintiffs have a chance to share their side of the story, invoking the state secrets privilege and other procedural hurdles.
Vupen occupies a gray area of computer security research, selling vulnerabilities to vetted parties in governments and companies but not sharing the details with affected software vendors. The company advocates that its information helps organisations defend themselves from hackers, and in some cases, play offense as well.
A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.
Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered.
Yesterday, EFF, on behalf of its client Kyle Goodwin, filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload’s service and denied third parties like Mr. Goodwin access to their property. The government also filed a brief of its own, calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require third parties—often individuals or small companies—to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings, just to get their own property back.
I don’t normally focus on civil liberties here, but today’s news about John Kiriakou’s guilty plea really strikes a nerve. During the last decade, CIA operatives allegedly tortured accused terrorists in an effort to extract information to them in violation of US and international law. Kiriakou, appalled by his colleagues’ behavior, leaked the name of one of the participants to a reporter. The Obama administration brought charges against Kiriakou for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Kiriakou’s guilty plea makes this the first successful prosecution under the act in the last quarter-century.
eam GhostShell, the hacker group responsible for the recent leak of some 120,000+ records raided from top universities around the world, has done it again.
“GhostShell is declaring war on Russia’s cyberspace, in ‘Project BlackStar’. The project is aimed at the Russian Government. We’ll start off with a nice greeting of 2.5 million accounts/records leaked, from governmental, educational, academical, political, law enforcement, telecom, research institutes, medical facilities, large corporations (both national and international branches) in such fields as energy, petroleum, banks, dealerships and many more,” the wrote in the statement accompanying the leak.
There’s been a noticeable shift in the way that prominent figures talk about how to deal with climate change. Many advocates have shifted from a more accommodating “let’s all join together and develop clean energy” message to directly targeting the fossil fuel industry as a villain. This effort, embodied in 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour, has become a central piece of messaging in the environmental community.
Goldman Sachs has been getting a string of bad publicity recently, with former Goldman board member Rajat Gupta being sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. And in March, London executive Greg Smith resigned in an op-ed in The New York Times, where he accused the company of corruption.
Smith, who started as an intern at the firm in 2000, worked him way up to a position as a vice president before ending his 12-year career in spectacular fashion. His subsequent tell-all book, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story” comes out this week. Greg Smith comes to “Starting Point” with more on his story.
But the hurricane has also revealed divisions in the city that existed long before Sandy touched ground: between rich and poor, and between the workers who make the city run and the wealthy who reap the benefits.
The Kuwaiti authorities must drop charges against Musallam al-Barrak, who faces prosecution purely for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression with remarks he made that have been deemed to undermine the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al Sabah, Amnesty International said.
A Bangkok court acquitted the netizen Surapak Phuchaisaeng two days ago of charges of insulting the king (lèse-majesté), for which he had been remanded in custody since September last year.
Reporters Without Borders is satisfied with the outcome of this case. “This case, involving a year in custody, underlines the failings of the Thai judicial system, particularly concerning allegations of lèse-majesté,” the press freedom organization said.
When the Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to vindicate the rights of Megaupload users who used the locker site for non-infringing purposes, they put forward Kyle Goodwin. The Ohio videographer used Megaupload as a backup service, but he lost commercially valuable footage thanks to the unlucky combination of the government’s January raid and a personal hard drive crash. Since May, he has been seeking the return of his files.
Not only did publishers not get the injunctive relief they sought in a closely watched case over e-reserves, last week they paid the tab. In a final order in the Georgia State E-reserves case, Cambridge University Press vs. Patton, Judge Orinda Evans directed the publisher plaintiffs to pay the defendants nearly $3 million in legal fees and costs, including $2,861,348.71 in attorneys’ fees and $85,746.39 in other court costs. And, last week, on October 26, records show that the publishers deposited more than $3.2 million into the Commercial Registry of the Court for the Northern District of Georgia. The money, however, isn’t gone yet—publishers have appealed the case, and the money will stay in escrow under a stay order until the appeal is settled.
When many of us think of Linux, we think of our own roll-your-own deployments of it on our own devices, but there is a fast-growing trend toward powerful companies with commercial interests driving desktop and server systems that run Linux.
Globetom today announced that GP3, globetom’s charging and fulfilment platform, has achieved Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Linux Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Today’s announcement demonstrates that globetom supports GP3 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Linux.
At the beginning of the week I reported that AMD got rid of at least three of their Linux kernel developers. It’s becoming more clear though that it’s not only three long-time Linux kernel developers they have let go.
Since the posting on Monday, there’s been talk and speculation within the forums what is happening at AMD. We have known since last month the company has been making plans to let go around 15% of its staff due to poor financial performance out of the company, but it seems their Linux work will take a material impact in this latest round of “layoffs” at the organization.
The Penumbra games collection developed by Frictional Games and distributed by Paradox Interactive, have appeared in the Steam for Linux application database.
Last year there was the release of CoreBreach, a racing game originally developed for Mac OS X that came out of the Austrian-based CoreCode game studio. Back in June the studio exclusively shared with Phoronix that they want to open-source CoreBreach while now to kick off November, they have released the game’s source-code. CoreBreach was ported to Linux from OS X using GNUstep, etc.
It’s not yet been announced yet on the CoreCode web-site, but they sent in an exclusive email to Phoronix yesterday and then this morning proceeded to announce it in the Phoronix Forums. Their brief announcement reads, “the source code to CoreBreach (GPL) and its 3D engine (MIT) has now been published on GitHub. enjoy.” The code is available as Core-Code on GitHub.
To express myself mildly, I’m not a fan of interfaces for mobile devices. At best, they seem clumsy makeshifts, tolerable only because nothing better is available. The only exception is KDE’s Plasma Active, which not only works well on tablets, but, with its recently released version 3.0, remains the only mobile-inspired interface I can tolerate on a workstation — and that includes Unity and Windows RT.
He has now given KDE a try after a long time. Linus using your software is double edged sword, it cuts both ways especially if Linus doesn’t like it, get ready for the harshest, yet the most honest and useful criticism.
So, what does Linus think of KDE? It looks he did not use KDE for a long while as his statement clarifies, “I’m trying out KDE after a long absense.”
Pear Linux 6 is based on Ubuntu 12.04, and features many new and cool features. In fact, the version of Pear Shell that comes with Pear Linux 6 is a near-complete overhaul of the edition in Pear Linux 5. And by my assessment, it is probably the best GNOME Shell adaptation available. It is most definitely better than the stock GNOME Shell.
Tiny Core Project lead Robert Shingledecker has released version 4.7 of his minimal desktop Linux distribution. Shingledecker says that the major theme for the new version is improvements to its bundled GUI programs. The OnDemand system has been overhauled to add support for Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications OnDemand menus and icons.
While Adam Williamson emailed a serious proposal about considering Fedora as a rolling-release distribution, so far there haven’t been many other Fedora developers/users in favour of such a change. Most of those expressing dissenting opinions are concerned that Fedora would just become too unstable and that a rolling-release model isn’t too different from the “Fedora Rawhide” development packages as it stands today.
It’s unlikely that Fedora as a rolling-release will get picked up, but for
Canonical’s VP of Sales and Business Development, Chris Kenyon, shared some interesting stats on Ubuntu’s uptake in the world in a presentation to attendees of the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit.
Early in October I wrote that Ubuntu TV would be a focus for 13.04 as the TV-focused Ubuntu spin was still being ported to Unity 3D. This week in Copenhagen at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, new plans for Ubuntu TV were drawn.
Facebook, Red Hat, Hewlett-Packard and other big vendors have joined a project to develop Linux OS software for the upcoming generation of ARM-based servers, the companies announced Thursday.
Red Hat, HP, Facebook and other big vendors have joined a project to develop Linux OS software for the upcoming generation of ARM-based servers, the companies announced yesterday.
Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Micro, Calxeda, Canonical, Cavium and Marvell are among the other companies to join the Linaro Enterprise Group within Linaro, a not-for-profit, multivendor engineering group. They join existing members ARM, HiSilicon, Samsung and ST-Ericsson.
The tiny, wildly popular $35 Raspberry Pi Linux computer may become a player in the game emulation world. A new Kickstarter project, launched on Tuesday, aims to create kits that will use the ARM devices to power little gaming cabinets: the Picade and Picade Mini.
At the end of September, after years writing about how ARM Holdings (ARMH) was beating Intel (INTC), I decided to run an experiment.
I sold some Intel shares, which I’d had since the 1990s, and bought 100 ARMHs.
Since then ARMH is up about 20%, while INTC is down 1%. It’s true INTC carries a fatter dividend, which gets me even on the period once that comes in later this month, but for now I’d have to say that my intuition about these stocks was right and I’m profiting from it.
t’s been five days fat with Android achievement this week to the point that the maestros over at Mountain View must think Christmas has come early. Following the disappointing cancellation of Monday’s launch event in New York City due to the horrendous hurricane Sandy, we learned that the Google Play store had gained an incredible 25,000 extra apps in the last month alone and was now home to a whopping, Apple App Store rivalling, 700,000! News enough for one week, you might think, however…
Google’s Android OS has grown a lot since its humble beginnings in 2008. Some may have thought that it couldn’t beat iOS, but its spread across multiple devices from multiple OEMs has insured its success. That success can be plainly seen in smartphone shipments during the third quarter.
GnuCash is an open source accounting app for Linux, Windows, and Mac computers. It’s sort of an open source alternative to Quicken, allowing you to track your income and spending, run reports, view graphics, and do much, much more.
Oh, sure, Android appears to be on track to dominate tablets, just as it does the smartphone market. But Android is hardly a paragon of open-source virtue. In 2011, VisionMobile concluded that Android is one of the most closed open-source projects, at least when compared to other major open-source projects like Linux, Firefox and others. Google, not surprisingly, chafes at this characterisation, but its own engineering directors admit Android is “both open and closed depending on business needs at any given time.”
It’s just another day at the office for Android handsets, kicking everybody else’s behinds. According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), Android-powered handsets maintain their commanding lead over Apple’s iOS devices and others in the global smartphone market for Q3 2012.
With the release of version 1.5 of the Free Edition of its Burp Suite, PortSwigger has given the security tool suite a fresh new look and taught it to listen to Android devices. The Burp developers say that Android deviates from the SSL standard when establishing encrypted connections but added that this no longer causes problems for the analysis tool as they have implemented a workaround for the non-standard CONNECT requests.
There are many business advantages of vendor-supported open source software over proprietary software, such as greater business flexibility due to no vendor lock-in and better business support.
Jan-Jan van der Vyver, MD of Linux Warehouse, says this is a key finding of the ITWeb-Linux Warehouse Open Source Survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for a fortnight in September, attracting 192 responses.
Indeed, we’ve already seen Ubuntu loaded up on the cloud-centric laptop, along with a port of openSUSE and a published guide to accessing the Gentoo Linux kernel that powers the versatile Chromebook.
It’s a continuation of one of computing’s longest-standing dilemmas: Open or Closed.
An earlier episode of this saga was Apple’s closed desktop OS platform, which can only be installed on Apple’s hardware, versus Microsoft Windows’ ability to be installed on any manufacturer’s PC hardware. Then there was closed source like Windows versus open source like Linux. The latest strife is between mobile apps and Web apps based on HTML5. Mobile apps are obtained through the platform makers own gate-keeping app store, and run only on the one platform, while HTML5 apps should run an any device with a browser.
Australian Drupal development shop PreviousNext has launched a beta program for a new open source offering intended to make adoption of the open source content management system (CMS) more appealing to government agencies.
WordPress is something of a dark secret on the Internet. The blogging platform, which is nearly a decade old, powers an incredible one-sixth of the Internet (including this blog).
The secret of WordPress’s domination, said its youthful founder, Matt Mullenweg, is being open source. “It is not about openness, it is about responsiveness,” he told the audience at the Founders Festival in Vienna. “Users, customers and for us, our developers are all the same thing. They tell you what they want–if you listen.”
A group of colleagues—Stoney Jackson (Western New England University), Sean Goggins (Drexel University), Darci Burdge (Nassau Community College), Lori Postner (Nassau Community College), and Greg Hislop (Drexel University)—and I have recently been awarded an NSF TUES Type 2 grant we’re calling OpenFE for Open Faculty Expertise. The expertise that we’re trying to build here is in the area of supporting student learning via participation in humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects.
Cloud services provider Acquia has commissioned a Forrester report on open source WCM, and while the results are not overwhelming, it does show more enterprise companies are employing open source systems.
Digium this week released Asterisk 11, (though I bet more than a few people missed it since Digium didn’t do a particularly good job in promoting the release IMHO, great tech terrible marketing/PR). This is the first major Long Term Support release (LTS) since the 1.8 release that came out two years ago in October of 2010. So yeah, a bit of a number jumble here..
As part of Microsoft’s attempt to convince us all that Windows 8 is not the dogs’ dinner some claim it is, Steve Ballmer announced this week that the company had sold 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in the first three days of general availability. While that number (which must include some combination of downloads and discs) sounds impressive, it leaves me cold. After all, I remember the open source download metrics at Sun Microsystems.
Entrepreneur and inventor website FundaGeek has launched a software development stream at fundageek.com/software to assist software developers in securing funding for their projects.
With a strong leaning towards independent open source innovators, the site aims to help all areas of software development – web applications (e-commerce), games, social media apps, open source, mobile apps and traditional “shrink wrap” software.
Libvirt, the virtualization API born at Red Hat seven years ago for interfacing with KVM/QEMU, Xen, LXC, OpenVX, VirtualBox, and other virtualization components, has finally reached version 1.0.0.
Sirius has confirmed that it has been awarded a place on the UK government G-Cloud Framework. The firm will be making its full range of open source products available through the CloudStore.
Tang and velcro aren’t the only things that NASA helped to invent that are part of our modern world. NASA has also played a pivotal role in the emergence of cloud technology that could reshape the vast IT world here on Earth.
Members of the independent Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) have approved version 1.0 of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) as a standard. AMQP is an open protocol for exchanging messages between systems that defines transmission formats, queuing behaviour and the implementation of services.
I agree with nearly everything Jill Stein of the Greens and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party say: except when they say “vote for me” in swing states.
The privatization of public goods and services turns basic human needs into products to buy and sell. That’s more than a joke, it’s an insult, it’s a perversion. It generally benefits only a privileged group of businesspeople and their companies while increasing inequality and undermining the common good.
THE US mission in Benghazi that came under attack by militants on September 11 was mainly a secret CIA operation, the Wall Street Journal reports, shedding new light on the deadly assault.
What happens when one of the biggest media groups in the world sets up its own private security force? What happens when part of this operation goes rogue? Fairfax reporter Neil Chenoweth’s new book, Murdoch’s Pirates, investigates News Corporation’s links to worldwide piracy. Here is an extract from the book.
The story is complex, but I’ll attempt to summarize. In the late 90s, NDS (the branch of News Corp that deals with private security and anti-piracy activities) sent top hacker Oliver Kömmerling undercover to Toronto, under the pseudonym Alex, with a mission: pose as a satellite pirate and infiltrate the rings selling hacked DirecTV smartcards. Oliver was also one of the hackers directly involved in the hacking of competitors’ smart cards, but in this case he was being put to work defending News Corp’s own satellite operation. But NDS made one big mistake: they never told DirecTV, which had its own security/anti-hacking division led by a former FBI agent, and they believed Oliver was still a bonafide satellite pirate at large. They had no idea he was now working for NDS—and one of the Canadian hackers Oliver met with turned out to be working for DirecTV, and ratted him out to them. Moreover, no matter NDS or Oliver’s intentions, he was breaking the law by hacking and selling smart cards to track down the “real” hackers—so he ended up facing potential arrest or detainment at the border.
The fossil fuel industry has paid a hefty price for the privilege of framing the political discourse about America’s energy future. Hundreds of millions have flowed into campaign coffers from energy companies attempting to purchase complete freedom to drill, frack, and burn. Huge “dark money” groups, the Koch’s, Karl Rove, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, join dozens of oil and gas industry associations in pouring money into television ad campaigns demanding “energy independence,” while trashing wind and solar.
Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama even mentions six alternative economic policies that, deployed together, would reduce unemployment, increase workers’ real earnings and decrease the federal deficit.
Kostas Vaxevanis hates being the centre of attention. On Thursday moments before taking the stand in one of the most sensational trials to grip Greece in modern times, the journalist said he was not in the business of making news. “My job is simply to tell the news and tell it straight,” he averred. “My job is to tell the truth.”
Truth in the case of Vaxevanis has been a rollercoaster that has catapulted the 46-year-old from relative obscurity to global stardom in a matter of days. But , after a hearing that lasted almost 12 hours – with a three-member panel of judges sitting stony-faced throughout, he was vindicated: the court found him not guilty of breaking data privacy laws by publishing the names in Hot Doc, the weekly magazine he edits, of some 2,059 Greeks believed to have bank accounts in Switzerland.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for the $60 billion global diamond industry, and Israel’s burgeoning diamond industry in particular, as the dynamic forces of economics, human rights, and politics careen towards a major showdown in Washington. The fallout is likely to blow the lid on a cozy cartel that has kept the scandal of cut and polished blood diamonds hidden from public scrutiny.
In November members of the Kimberley Process (KP) diamond-regulatory system, ostensibly set up to end the trade in blood diamonds, will come under severe pressure to adopt a US proposal, rejected last June, which would slightly broaden of the definition of a “conflict diamond” to include rough diamonds linked to violence by government forces associated with diamond mining.
A civil court has sentenced an online activist to six months in prison on charges of insulting the Gulf nation’s king in Twitter posts, the official news agency said Thursday.
Kuwaiti police used teargas and smoke bombs on Wednesday to disperse thousands of protesters marching on a prison where an opposition leader is being held on charges of insulting the emir, witnesses said.
Does a tweet on reports of corruption, sent out to 16 followers, deserve a possible penalty of three years of imprisonment? The answer seems to be yes, at least according to Congress leader and Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s son Karti, who filed a complaint against small-time Puducherry businessman Ravi Srinivasan, and the Puducherry police which charged Mr. Srinivasan under Section 66-A of the Information Technology Act, 2008.
Section 66-A deals with messages sent via computer or communication devices which may be “grossly offensive,” have “menacing character,” or even cause “annoyance or inconvenience.” For offences under the section, a person can be fined and jailed up to three years.
The Russian government has opened a blacklist of websites that will be blocked from domestic internet users to avoid them harming themselves with too much information.
The new rules mean that ISPs will automatically block websites that the courts have deemed inappropriate. The law was introduced with the usual caveats about it being to protect children from online predators and to stop drug distribution, but political websites that criticize Tsar President Putin have already been blocked by the courts.
I’ve been buried in a book deadline for all of October, and haven’t been paying much attention to anything else. When I finally took some time to catch up reading email, I noticed I had many authors (more than twenty) contacting me because their Amazon reviews were disappearing. Some were the ones they wrote. Some were for their books. One author told me that reviews her fans had written–fans that were completely unknown to her–had been deleted.
I took a look at the reviews I’d written, and saw more than fifty of them had been removed, namely reviews I did of my peers. I don’t read reviews people give me, but I do keep track of numbers and averages, and I’ve also lost a fair amount of reviews.
Larry Ward will concede that he “poked the bear.” As president of the D.C.-based Political Media Inc., Ward administers the Facebook page of a group called Special Operations Speaks (SOS), an anti-Obama group consisting of “veterans, legatees, and supporters of the Special Operations communities of all the Armed Forces.” Essentially hard guys who want the president out of office. “These are the toughest sons of a guns out there and they say what they mean,” says Ward.
Today ORG have launched a new campaign to fund a legal project which will allow us to create new case law and lead on bringing digital rights issues to the courts.
When I read and translated that post, I immediately thought of what happened and is happening in my home country, Argentina. I was about to start my vacations in Europe and I thought that particular trip would help me write this. I was not wrong.
We Argies are not new to biometric data. One of the existing fingerprint-recording systems was invented in Buenos Aires and used as a tool during the military dictatorships the country suffered (particularly during the last). In fact, thanks to a law enacted during one of those dictatorships, every citizen must have a government-issued ID, consisting of his/her name, last name, address, date of birth, sex, fingerprint and photograph.
Every week, somewhere in the US, there’s a story of some kind of police activity that leads people scratching their head, or saying ‘That isn’t right’. It’s an issue that’s been around as long as police officers have and has become a cliche, accepted without question. The problem is that it’s a problem that’s only getting worse, not better, and it’s a problem that’s not being addressed.
The Iranian authorities must protect all detainees and prisoners from harassment and degrading treatment, Amnesty International said today, after nine female political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, started a hunger strike in response to alleged abuse by prison guards.
The women, who are all held in Tehran’s Evin Prison include activists and journalists. They say they were subjected to humiliating and degrading body searches by female guards from the Prison Security Section who subsequently confiscated some of their personal belongings on Tuesday
We’ve had plenty of stories concerning open WiFi, and there seems to be a general opinion among some that open WiFi is “a bad thing.” Some have even tried (and failed) to argue that having an open WiFi network makes you negligent. In some areas, law enforcement has even gone around telling people to lock up their WiFi. Those who argue against open WiFi are generally conflating different issues. It is true that if you use an open WiFi network without securing yourself you do open up yourself to snooping from others. Similarly, if others are using your open WiFi, it it could lead to at least an investigation if your access point is used for nefarious purposes. But combining those to claim that open WiFi itself is bad or illegal is a mistake. It is entirely possible to secure your own activities, and to set up an open WiFi network in a reasonable manner that minimizes any such threat.
Village Voice is claiming that Yelp’s infringement is “willful” because it notified the company, and Yelp apparently told them to go away. It’s also ridiculously claiming that Yelp’s usage has “irreparably harmed” the company. I realize that’s standard language used in such lawsuits, but seriously?
The laws governing intellectual monopolies in the UK are in a state of flux at the moment. After the previous government in its dying hours rammed through the shoddy piece of work known as the Digital Economy Act, the present coalition government took a more rational approach by commissioning the Hargreaves Review into the impact of digital technologies on this area. One of its key proposals was that policy should be based on evidence, not “lobbynomics”; the fact that this even needs to be mentioned says much about the way laws have been framed until now.
As a result, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has been trying to gather evidence in order to help politicians draw up new policies that correspond to the data, not just dogma. Not surprisingly, perhaps, those that have done well under the previous evidence-free approach have been mounting a rearguard action against the changes.
The third party DMCA patrolbot featured today first made its name known by claiming malware uploaded by a computer security researcher as its own, resulting in a shutdown of the researcher’s Mediafire account. LeakID, the “company” (and we’ll explore those scare quotes in a moment) behind the takedown practices what many other sketchy content enforcers do — bulk keyword searches. This results in false positives that get swept up with all the actual infringement, such as in the case linked above. LeakID also ordered a Microsoft Office patch (freely available at Microsoft’s website) be removed from this user’s account.
A federal court in Illinois has handed down the largest ever damages award in a BitTorrent case. In a default judgment defendant Kywan Fisher from Hampton, Virginia is ordered to pay $1,500,000 to adult entertainment company Flava Works for sharing 10 of their movies on BitTorrent. The huge total was reached through penalties of $150,000 per movie, the maximum possible statutory damages under U.S. copyright law. It’s expected that the verdict will be used to motivate other BitTorrent defendants to settle their cases.
Earlier this year, we applauded District Court Judge Alsup for getting it right and holding that, as a matter of law, one could not copyright APIs. The case, Oracle v. Google, is now on appeal to the Federal Circuit, where a three-judge panel is going to revisit Judge Alsup’s ruling.
Apple is in big trouble in Mexico, right before the holiday season starts. The company has lost rights to the name iPhone in the country as it was already owned by a Mexican telecom company named iFone. Trademark conflicts are not new but the way Apple handled this one (and all others) shows how arrogant this company is.
Timothy Geigner expands on that by saying what it means for other companies: “Is this whole trademark nonsense necessary? Probably not. I can’t claim to be an expert on how the average Mexican citizen associates something that says iFone with Apple, but I’m guessing they’re smart and in-tune with technology enough that they know the two aren’t related. I could be wrong about that, but there’s one thing I’m not wrong about.”
Apple is a very brand-dependent company. That — not innovation — is why some people overpay for gadgets which carry the Apple (or iPhone) badge. █
The government ordered public bodies to purge their computer systems of proprietary software standards, those data formats and interfaces over which dominant software companies had made property claims established under US patent law.
It decreed that public bodies must instead implement non-proprietary, open standards; under rules it had codified so tightly that it left little room for doubt that it had at last found the courage of its convictions.
Well, almost. The policy didn’t apply to “commercial, off-the-shelf software”, those ubiquitous, proprietary software packages against which government had formulated its open standards policy in the first place. It was written in reference only to bespoke systems. But let’s not spoil the party by picking hairs, for a moment at least.
Disregarding COTS, the policy was far cry from the prevarication that has characterised UK technology policy since 2010, when the coalition was elected. The government committed its open standards pledge to paper in 2011. The proprietary software industry immediately protested at what would amount to the confiscation of its means to assert monopoly power. The protest was led by COTS suppliers Microsoft and Oracle. The government’s resolve was so weak it recanted.
United Kingdom open standards policy a boost for open source
One of the aims of the United Kingdom’s Open Standard Principles, published today, is to boost the use of free and open source software solutions by the country’s public administrations. The new policy describes principles for the selection and specification of open standards which can be implemented in both open source and proprietary software.
A belated post by Glyn Moody accentuates the positive, focusing on what he and the FSFE have been working hard to get across:
Finally: UK Open Standards are RF, not FRAND
In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government’s approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles.
[...]
Transparency is crucial for another reason. As readers may recall from the many Open Enterprise blog posts over the last year describing the extremely long process that has led to the framing of this new policy, companies like Microsoft have fought very hard to prevent RF being enshrined in the new rules. They and their proxies will be looking for any opportunity to challenge the new rules – not least in the courts.
However, I think opponents of the Open Standards Principles will need to think carefully before taking that course. The Cabinet Office has been scrupulous in giving them a chance to make their case, along with everyone else. The original definition of open standards was withdrawn as a result of pressure being applied, and not one, but two consultations have been carried about to solicit views in this area. Indeed, the UK government has made what are probably unprecedented efforts to hear all sides of the argument.
That’s evident in the home page listing the Open Standards Consultation documents. There you will find not only Principles themselves, but a host of ancillary information. These include the Government’s Response, which explains the process that led to them, including consolidated statistics, a more detailed analysis of every question, and an independent review of the evidence by the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University, which is essentially the report that I wrote about back in September.
This extraordinary level of detail in terms of the consultations and their analysis is a clear sign that the Cabinet Office means business here, and that it is prepared to defend its work in the courts if necessary. The time and money that it has invested in this project over the last few years is also a token of its seriousness and desire to make open standards a reality in this country, and to establish a level playing field for government computing.
Assuming that happens – and based on the new Principles, the signs it will are good – that would represent the start of a new era for IT procurement in the UK. The Cabinet Office team deserves kudos for at least giving us that possibility.
While it’s a step in the right direction, flaws remain and if FOSS proponents celebrate too much, nothing will improve. █
* Prof. Adam Mossoff, George Mason University School of Law
* Prof. David S. Olson, Boston College Law School
* Mr. Robert Sachs, Partner, Fenwick & West LLP
* Moderator: Prof. Mark F. Schultz, Southern Illinois University School of Law
Notice that none of these people is a scientist. This is why we end up in such a rotten state of affair. Nobody bothers to consult people who actually write computer programs.
Since the US elections are fast approaching, I thought I would remark very quickly on what I call the “Business Party” — a two-faction, corporate-run delusion of a choice where those in power are plutcrats who send orders to lawyers-turned-politicians. As long as this system remains in place, nothing will change. At least, nothing will change in people’s favour. █
NB – If Romney was fitted onto this image, he would be one among the individual people who shout “Change”. There are more than two options in the race, but corporate press merginalises those. Voting for the lesser evil (Obama in my humble assessment) still helps endorse a fake democracy and validate/solidify the role of the Business Party.
Posted in Apple, Deception at 11:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple complies not with court orders but with intuition which limits damage to reputation
According to electronic publications like The Verge, Apple is printing — through the paper medium alone — some apology right after failing to do so in its Web site [1, 2, 3, 4]. Apple should remove or amend what its site was saying, but will it? There is more than one paper with the apology, but what will Apple preach to its choir which keeps insisting that Android is “stealing”? We keep seeing such claims in Twitter and beyond (links omitted as they are rebutted therein). People are still sceptical of what Apple is doing:
Apple’s apology to Samsung has hit the printed newspapers today. It’s shorter than the one it was ordered to rewrite, but does it sound like Apple means it this time?
We believe that in order for Apple to stop its more arrogant or zealous supporters from spreading FUD it should lead by example with a sincere statement at Apple.com. █
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Summary: Apple’s Hubris and reluctance to comply with court orders is costing it not just in bad publicity but also a more severe and stern order
Apple is a nasty company based on its behaviour in recent years. It’s not mere emotion that makes one call Apple “nasty”; this has become a widely-held perception, sometimes about Apple’s most passionate customers too. Watch Apple getting criticised for its aggressive nature again:
Apple is a litigious company, most famously for its multi-billion dollar patent crusade against Samsung. The Cupertino company has a more quixotic legal battle going on against its competitors, however, that has also become a bit of a war against the English language. Since last year, Apple lawyers have been arguing that “App Store” is a trademarked phrase, and it has the right to stop others from using similar phrases. That includes Amazon, which was sued by Apple in March 2011, shortly after it opened the Amazon Appstore for Android.
Now, some of those issues are finally coming to a head in public. At a hearing today in an Oakland federal court, it became clear that while Apple may have a lot of fury and passion behind this lawsuit, it has run into trouble in the form of a very skeptical judge. US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton showed great doubt that Apple will be able to prove that consumers were confused or deceived by Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore.” At this point, it’s somewhat remarkable that the company hasn’t dropped this suit, since Hamilton indicated a year ago that she was unimpressed by Apple’s arguments and denied a preliminary injunction.
“Forstall’s name is on 166 pending patent applications. That’s more than anyone at the company, according to data from investment bank MDB Capital.”
Those patents have been used against companies like Samsung, usually in vain. Apple is getting told off by judges who accuse the company of breach of order. To quote: “Apple tried to argue that it would take 14 days to post an updated notice on its website, but the request was shot down. In fact, Judge Jacob made it clear that Apple’s actions are beginning to make him testy.”
Last week we noted that Apple had put up a rather petulant non-apology apology in response to the UK court order requiring it to advertise to the world that Samsung didn’t copy Apple in making its devices. Many people wondered how the court would react to Apple’s attempt… and the answer is that the court is not pleased (and is further displeased by Apple’s claim that it needs two weeks to come up with something better)…
Pamela Jones says that Apple must go further than before:
There are consequences now that are worse than before. Apple tried to argue that they followed the letter of the law in the original notice, as does Patently Apple. But there is something called the spirit of the law too, and if you follow one and thumb your nose at the other, things can go wrong, because people notice. Judges are not stupid. Not that I believe what Apple did obeyed the letter of the law either. Nor did the judge in the UK.
It’s never all right to show disrespect to a court of law, and lawyers above all others should take the lead in demonstrating that respect. The rule of law actually depends on it, which is another way of saying that civilization itself depends on it. Otherwise, it’s back to pistols at dawn, or worse.
We wrote about the fake apology several times before [1, 2, 3]. Here is the best report we found in the sense that it’s not shy to slam Apple:
Apple Has To Readmit That Samsung Did Not Copy iPad Design: Reprimanded By Court
[...]
Judge Jacob said, “I’m at a loss that a company such as Apple would do this. That is a plain breach of the order.”
Apple’s arrogance doesn’t end here. The company requested 14 days to make the changes. Wow. Why would a company need 14 days to make changes to it’s own site? Typical Apple.
Judge Jacob did not buy this and rejected the request stating, “I just can’t believe the instructions you’ve been given. This is Apple. They cannot put something on their website?”
Apple has 48 hours to re-write a statement on its website relating to its design rights dispute with Samsung, UK judges have ruled.
[...]
Lord Justice Longmore told Mr Beloff: “We are just amazed that you cannot put the right notice up at the same time as you take the other one down.”
Sir Robin Jacob added: “I would like to see the head of Apple [Tim Cook] make an affidavit about why that is such a technical difficulty for the Apple company.”
Now, that would be entertaining. Apple got itself deeper in the PR blunder. Its arrogance sure works against its intentions and brings no benefit. █
Firms that are profiting from patents (without actually producing or inventing anything) want us to obsess over and think about the rare and few cases (some very old) where judges deny Alice and honour patents on software
The issues associated with the UPC, especially in light of ongoing negotiations of Britain's exit from the EU, remain too big a barrier to any implementation this year (and probably future years too)
India's resilience in the face of incredible pressure to allow software patents is essential for the success of India's growing software industry and more effort is needed to thwart corporate colonisation through patents in India itself
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
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