06.05.10

IRC Proceedings: June 5th, 2010

Posted in IRC Logs at 11:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME Gedit

Read the log

Enter the IRC channel now

Trend Micro Still a Patent Bully, John Desmarais is Becoming a Massive Patent Troll

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Boycott Trend Micro

Summary: Trend Micro is taking its aggressiveness to yet another company and a wealthy lawyer turns to patent trolling, just like many predecessors

MANY posts of ours mentioned Trend Micro back in 2008 when it attacked Free software [1, 2]. Groklaw reveals more litigation from Trend Micro, this time targeting yet another company using an obvious software patent. [via]

Do you remember a couple of years ago Barracuda Networks asked us to help find prior art to help deal with a Trend Micro patent on, believe it or not, blocking viruses at the gateway, of all obvious things?

You did find some, the ITC then said the patent, #5,623,600, was invalid, and you’d think that would be the end of that.

But no, software patents live in their own illogical alternate universe, and because Trend Micro and Barracuda settled instead of getting a court ruling of invalidity, Trend Micro was free to threaten others and to continue to take in royalties on that patent.

Trend Micro is not a patent troll, but it’s a patent bully and thus a threat to the industry. “I would much rather spend my time and money and energy finding ways to make the Internet safer and better than bickering over patents,” said Dean Drako (Barracuda’s CEO) in response to Trend Micro’s despicable action. The banner at the top comes from a call for a boycott against Trend Micro (resulting from this one particular incident).

In other news, there are some real patent trolls to watch out for. According to Bloomberg, John Desmarais becomes a patent troll:

Billion-Dollar Lawyer Desmarais Quits Firm to Troll for Patents

[...]

Desmarais, 46, in December bought a portfolio of 4,500 patents from Micron Technology Inc., the biggest U.S. maker of computer-memory chips. Today he opens the doors of a new law firm, New York-based Desmarais LLP, which will look for potential infringers of the patents owned by Round Rock Research LLC, his new patent-holding company.

“Big Time Patent Attorney Jumps Into The Patent Trolling Game By Buying 4,500 Patents From Micron” is how TechDirt puts it:

That story is now getting more attention, as Bloomberg has an entire article about Desmarais jumping ship from his big law firm to buy 4,500 patents from Micron and put them into a new firm that will be used to demand money from lots of tech companies.

Microsoft’s unjust enforcement of ‘Linux tax’ is still being done by proxy, using companies like Novell and Tuxera. IDG has just republished the post from Julie (Microsoft Subnet) under an even more daunting headline. It says “Android gets SDXC flash driver, Microsoft gets royalties” (which Julie called “good news”, apparently speaking for Microsoft’s side). █

Microsoft is Seven-Washing Its Lousy Platform for ARM

Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft, Windows at 3:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Laundrette

Summary: Microsoft is renaming yet another product, adding the magic number “7″ as though brands alone will bring about success

AS Linux becomes dominant in mobile devices and all that Microsoft has is this thing called “CE” (which is regarded as somewhat of a joke), Microsoft is “Seven-washing” it — a term that we coined some weeks ago. It simply means adding the number “7″ to platforms, hoping that the platforms will be associated with Vista 7, which is more of a marketing/AstroTurf success than a technical success.

“It means that the product is doing so badly that unless it changes identity, no second chances will be given to it by the market.”It’s a tad amusing to see Microsoft Seven-washing just about any product it has. The reputation of many of its products is so low that it needs to borrow a boost from another branding campaign. The latest example is “Windows Embedded Compact 7″ [1, 2, 3]. Microsoft renames this platform almost every year, just as it does with its search and mobile products (Microsoft leaves “Windows Mobile” behind). It means that the product is doing so badly that unless it changes identity, no second chances will be given to it by the market.

Tim has noticed that Microsoft’s joke of a competition called “KIN” is doing pretty badly [1, 2, 3, 4]. He asks in his headline: “Only a month on and the Kin is discounted?”

Microsoft’s Kin phone which hit the news almost immediately, with some people taking exception to its advert where Microsoft was accused of promoting “sexting”.

After promptly removing the section they were then accused by some of overacting.

A few years back I remember entering a discussion on Microsoft Watch, where users were reporting that the Microsoft Zune was to be found in the bargain bin of stores (around the Xmas period) Could the Kin be destined for the “bargain bin” too?

Our guess is that “KIN” and “Zune” share the same trajectory, not just the same software. The leadership of both products recently left, which tells a bundle. ARM devices will not appeal to Windows programmers (who need to recompile everything), so Microsoft’s “Windows Embedded Compact 7″ is a non-starter without any useful applications. “KIN” has the exact same problem that branding work alone is not going to resolve. Microsoft might as well just give up on this area. Even its MVP Miguel de Icaza does not support their products; instead he targets Apple (not Linux). █

Microsoft Finds Out That Bribing Doesn’t Work in the Long Term, Neither Against Google Nor GNU/Linux

Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Search, Steve Ballmer, Windows at 2:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Prisoner population rate - 2007-2008

Summary: By bribing people to use its services and to use Windows, Microsoft only empties its coffers and devalues Windows

ON several occasions last year we wrote about what the mainstream press called “bribery” [1, 2, 3]. It was talking about Microsoft’s idea of paying Google customers to defect — an anti-competitive idea which turns out to have roots in the ever-so-predatory Bill Gates (who knows that in the United States prisons are built for impoverished hungry shoplifters, not crooked megalomaniacs).

TechDirt calls it bribery and offers some background information:

Microsoft Discovers That Bribing People To Use Its Search Engine Didn’t Work

We recently had a discussion about the role of money as an incentive and how it often doesn’t work the way people think it should (i.e., money often provides negative incentive — the opposite of what you would think). I’m actually working on another post about that topic that I’ll hopefully finish later today, but here’s a quick one demonstrating that point in action.

Way back in 2005, Bill Gates suggested that in the end, Microsoft would be able to beat Google because it had a secret weapon: it could bribe users to use Microsoft instead of Google, by offering them a cut of the advertising revenue.

The Microsoft reporters/PR have spun it a little [1, 2, 3], but the obvious takeaway is that Microsoft failed badly. This is an implicit admission that Bong [sic] is a road to nowhere.

Our reader Oiaohm called it “Cost cutting” and this probably makes sense because Microsoft has been suffering a loss of almost $3 billion per year in this area of operations (assuming the current pace continues).

In conclusion, Microsoft attempted to merely buy some market share and it cost it dearly.

Pogson brings up the fact that Microsoft used similar tactics against GNU/Linux (it apparently also bribed OEMs but didn’t call that a “bribe”).

After years of scrutiny by anti-competition police, Ballmer still doesn’t get it:

“When Mossberg asked why Microsoft had drastically lowered its price of Windows XP in reaction to netbook vendors having initially shipped units with Linux, Ballmer retreated by asking, “Why should I give someone else an opportunity?”.”

It’s the law, Steve. Monopolies are required to give competitors opportunities.

This exchange also answers the question why GNU/Linux has not taken a larger share of the desktop OS market.

This significantly hurt Microsoft financially, but the outcome was negative for GNU/Linux in sub-notebooks, as we explained in:

Sadly for Microsoft, Linux is very dominant in tablets right now. A Microsoft ally as big as HP even dumped Vista 7, replacing it with Linux. So what did Microsoft really achieve there? It only led to the cost of Windows going down, which still affects its bottom line. █

Microsoft Claims Patches for 34 Vulnerabilities Coming Tuesday, But There Are More

Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Security, Windows at 1:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Cards pile

Summary: Microsoft’s “official” number of vulnerabilities is a lie, so news Web sites need to challenge the notion that these numbers should be put in print

Microsoft is about to abandon many Windows XP users, at least in the security sense. As we already know, Windows XP has been left vulnerable due to Microsoft’s neglect since last year, so it’s not as though Microsoft ever truly bothered to keep all users secure. But anyway, we digress.

Microsoft’s “official” numbers say that 34 holes exist in Windows, Office and Internet Explorer right now. To quote CNET:

Microsoft will on Tuesday issue 10 bulletins fixing 34 vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer.

What CNET needs to add to this report is that Microsoft also admits hidden fixes, so the numbers above are a lower bound and an underestimate. As a matter of fact, after Microsoft’s own admission, journalists should refuse to parrot Microsoft’s “official” numbers and instead simply say that Microsoft is patching a lot of vulnerabilities, only X of which (34 in this case) it admits exist. █

Linux Oggcasts Speak About Novell’s Imminent Sale

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Red Hat at 1:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Microphone with cover

Summary: “Linux Outlaws” and TLLTS voice their opinion on the subject of Novell takeover while The Register contributes disinformation

A

s a listener of the Linux Outlaws audiocast (they make Ogg versions available, so the term “oggcast” from SFLS fits here), I happened to notice that Novell is discussed in last week’s episode, starting about 57 minutes from the beginning. We do not have a transcript and some of the details are inaccurate anyway, but one of the issues that come up is that Novell will sooner or later end up going on sale (not necessarily to be acquired by a company, possibly just a hedge fund which will take it private and possibly sell its assets gradually). At one stage they speak about Mono and Fab says that listeners are “dissing [MonoTouch] in the IRC”; Dan is right and Novell’s Mono has had the Android route going for quite some time, at least as an active plan [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13].

Another Linux show that I regularly listen to is TLLTS (Ogg versions available) and one listener analysed a recent episode in which Novell’s fate was discussed. The idea that Microsoft might buy Novell was brought up, leading to further thoughts:

If Microsoft Bought Novell

Then a thought occurred to me. If Microsoft did purchas Novell and then continue to distribute SuSE would that not invalidate their patent claims against other companies for using/selling GNU/Linux? Wouldn’t the GPL prevent them from distibuting SuSE while they hold patent suits against other companies for the same GPL’s software? I know more previsions were put in regarding this for version 3, but I wonder if even version 2 would uphold their inability to not file patent suite against companies using Linux and force an end to their FUD.

Meanwhile, regarding the SCO case, we learn from Groklaw that SCO has begun paying Novell:

It’s a start! SCO fi…na…l…ly pays the constructive trust monies, what it owes Novell, to Novell: $625,486.90.

The fate of Novell is very significant when it comes to this case against SCO, which can in turn affect companies like IBM and Red Hat. This takes us back to the ridiculous suggestion from The Register (with Microsoft tendencies as of late [1, 2, 3], especially from this author) that Red Hat might buy Novell. It would make no sense whatsoever, but some financial news sites foolishly quote those speculative claims from The Register. █

Links 5/6/2010: Pardus 2009.2, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Are Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Erosion

      The global number of PCs on the planet is around 1400 million. The gadgets are additional millions. This dilutes the sensitivity of this data for understanding the share of OS on PCs. The w3schools number for GNU/Linux, 4.5% is much more believable but even that site has a bias to that other OS because it has sections for .asp, etc. The w3schools numbers likely do not include phones and gadgets. In May 2009, w3schools showed that other OS as 89.5%. In May 2010, w3schools showed that other OS as 88.3%, a drop of 1.2% when their new “7″ OS is stocking retailers shelves. This must mean a fair chunk of businesses’ XP machines are migrating to MacOS and GNU/Linux. W3schools showed XP dropped 11.9 points in the past year so about 10% of those that migrated away from XP went away from that other OS. That is a potential 300 million XP business machines with 30 million leaving the fold. It’s not an avalanche but a trickle in a crack in the dam. I expect as early adopters in business find GNU/Linux works for them the crack will widen. People who encounter GNU/Linux at work may well demand retailers supply GNU/Linux, bursting the dam. 2014 is the date of XP’s demise.

    • Google and the Desktop

      We know GNU/Linux on the desktop is growing rapidly in deployments if not share and most of those deployments are in business because most users of PCs at home do not install operating systems. Google has simply been the most visible of late.

    • Linux Desktop Success Not in the Clouds

      The wild success of Linux in embedded space would lead to application development on an unprecedented scale for the various mobile Internet devices, which would lead to a renaissance of application development on the Linux desktop, which in turn would lead to the Ultimate Success of Linux on the Desktop and a world where we will finally get to say “This is the year of the $Expletive! Linux desktop.”

    • Passionate about … Operating Systems

      Linux’s answer to that is pretty easy. Linux is in and of itself a good work. It helps people the world over. You can learn how to write code from it. You can learn how an OS works from it. It powers things like the OLPC XO series of computers.

    • MSI 890GXM-G65

      About a month ago we reviewed the AMD Athlon II X3 425 processor when coupled with an AMD 890GX + SB850 motherboard and in this review we are taking a closer look at that motherboard under Linux.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • The Death of the Desktop (a video panel discussion)

      On Tuesday, KDE released and update to its 4.4 software compilation (4.4.4) and I happily updated my own system from the Kubuntu repositories. It’s a beautiful thing and with each update (and that includes GNOME by the way), I grow more and more attached to my personal desktop environment. And yet, there are those who claim it’s pretty much over for the desktop as we know it.

      All this flows very nicely into the discussion you are about to watch.

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • Akademy-es 2010 Big Success

        Every year, the KDE community in Spain organizes a local Akademy event: Akademy-es. This year’s event was held in Bilbao from 7th to 9th of May. The event gathered around 80 KDE contributors, users and Free Software enthusiasts from all over Spain and even people from other countries such as France and Ireland.

      • KDE PIM Stabilization Sprint

        The KDE PIM team meets regularly 3 times a year for stabilisation and planning.

        Face to face meetings like this help strengthen community bonds and allow progress and discussions not possible with IRC or email. For more information, be sure to check out the quotes section of the meeting page. We look forward to the next meeting and to seeing the new direction our platform will take!

      • Interview with Stephen Kelly

        My job currently involves improving the features and quality of KDE PIM and Akonadi on the desktop and on mobile platforms.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • YlmF OS – Ni Hao!

        YlmF is a refreshing product. It’s not a revolution, though. There have been other such projects in the past, including Lindows, Xandros and other cross-platform solutions, aimed at incorporating the best of both worlds and offering the user an optimal, blended experience, with familiarity and simplicity of Windows and the robustness and usefulness of Linux. Some have worked, some have not. In most cases, the fusion was not quite successful, often because of hardware issues and misguided expectations.

        YlmF does not fall into this same trap and elegantly escapes doom by being a solid, robust distribution. Truth to be told, the rite of passage is much easier than it was years ago, when Linux desktop was still a rough and unpredictable journey. Nevertheless, YlmF achieves more by trying less.

        Compared to Ubuntu, YlmF is a relatively humble fork. Much of the underlying parts are the same. Some of the programs are changed and you get codecs; other than that, YlmF keeps it simple. The only big, radical change is the user interface, which is exactly the aim of this distribution. Users have no idea what kernel is or how it works. But they can appreciate their desktop icons.

    • New Releases

      • Pardus 2009.2 Geronticus eremita

        The new updated version of Pardus 2009, Pardus 2009.2 Geronticus eremita announced with the new technologic features.
        Updates in Pardus Technologies

        Core Pardus technologies are updated to new versions, including many bugfixes, optimizations and new features.

        Pardus manager family has been refactored and optimized for new KDE 4.4 / Qt 4.6 environments. Pardus KDE tools, Network Plasmoid for easy network profile switching and Service Plasmoid for easy service management are available in our repositories. These plasmoids can be placed either on the desktop, or any of the panels on the desktop for easier access.

      • DigAnTel Version 3 has been released.

        DigAnTel-3 is a hybird Digital / Analog Telephone system utilizing open source CentOS Linux, Asterisk 1.4.30, DAHDI 2.3.0, FreePBX 2.7.0, VoicePulse module, Openfire IM, vtiger CRM with click to dial, PostFix mail, and OpenVPN. DigAnTel is the glue to bind these technologies thus creating a unified open source telephony system for your home or business. The installation is completely automated and doesn’t require a working knowledge of Linux or Asterisk. The system supports traditional analog telephone lines, digital T1/PRI lines and digital VOIP circuits.

      • Salix 13.1 is here!

        Salix 13.1 has been released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, Salix 13.1 is fully backwards compatible with Slackware 13.1. Salix 13.1 is built on top of a Slackware 13.1 base and offers a streamlined XFCE desktop environment with selected applications following the “one application per task” philosophy.

      • RIPLinuX 9.5
      • GParted 0.5.2-10
      • aLinux 14.0
      • Clonezilla 1.2.5-22
      • 31/05/10 – Vinux 3.0 Released:

        On behalf of the whole Vinux community I am happy to announce the 3rd release of Vinux – Linux for the Visually Impaired, based on Ubuntu 10.04 – Lucid Lynx. This version of Vinux provides three screen-readers, two full-screen magnifiers, dynamic font-size/colour-theme changing as well as support for USB Braille displays. Vinux is now available both as an installable live CD and as a .deb package which will automatically convert an existing installation of Ubuntu Lucid into an accessible Vinux system! In addition, we now have our own Vinux package repository (from which you can install our customised packages with apt-get/synaptic) and a dedicated Vinux IRC channel. In the very near future we will also be launching a Vinux Wiki and releasing special DVD, USB and Virtual Editions of Vinux 3.0!

      • Fluffy

        It all started out with Parley. We justed wanted to test the amazing theming capabilities in the upcoming 4.5 release of Parley, and eventually we ended up doing a whole distribution :-) Parley is a wonderful application that helps you learn all those beautiful languages out there using a flash card approach and an incredibly magnificant grading technique, so that you always know where you stand. Our Fluffy Bunny theme will also be part of the regular Parley release. So also users of other distributions will be able to enjoy our work.

      • Similarities

        The majority of early distributions had a niche to fill. Slackware was for BSD/UNIX people, Debian was for the open source fanatics, Knoppix was for the mobile, Tinfoil Hat was for the paranoid, Red Hat for servers and enterprise environments, Mandrake for Desktops, and BuildRoot/OpenWRT for embedded systems. Where are we now? Those same distributions can fill those same roles, and for the most part all of the others are… well… superfluous. Untangle can serve as a router, and there is a little competition there. Yet, most of the 400+ systems out there are just like every other.

      • Ten New Linux Distributions Inspired by News Stories

    • Red Hat Family

      • First look: Red Hat 6 built for the long

        Another important advancement in this new version is the ability for the OS to manipulate the power usage of applications. These features are capable through the use of a tickles kernel, which enables timer interrupts. If applications are not using the CPU, the computer can basically go idle until an application needs it. This creates cooler-running CPUs, and reduces the overall power consumption. When tested on a laptop PC, we found that it did indeed run cooler with these features enabled, especially when using only a couple programs with everything else sitting idle.

      • Going Paranoid on Fedora 13

        A Paranoid, or 5-star, security rating is the highest physical security rating that you can achieve on your computer. It entails enabling a set of OS-dependent and OS-independent features.

        But why would anyone want to achieve such a high physical security rating on Fedora or any other distribution? Strict control of who can access your data if your computer falls into the wrong hands, that’s why. The point is, if your computer is stolen, or seized by agents of the state, you do not want to make it easy for them to access your data. In fact, you want to make it impossible for them to access your data.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Linux for Windows Users

        The latest Ubuntu Linux release seems to have been a huge hit. Review after Review after Review have pretty much pegged it as the next best thing since sliced bread, but does this release of Ubuntu Linux live up to the hype?

      • Variants

        • Ubuntu Netbook 10.04 Screenshots
        • Parsix 3.5 “Frankie” Screenshots

          Parsix 3.5 “Frankie” is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed to complete everyday desktop tasks. This release syncs with Debian testing repositories as of April 7, 2010. and features many improvements worth noting. Users will enjoy a new look and feel, enhanced installer, experimental USB installer and much more. Here’s a list of some of the new features in Parsix 3.5. View the official release announcement for more information.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • PogoPlug II review

      Operating system: Linux using BusyBox

    • eReaders

      • Amazon Kindle for Linux

        By now I’m sure that most of you already know that Apple’s iPad has drawn the attention of many people who might have otherwise bought a Kindle. Amazon is in for the fight of its life against Apple’s slick, new hardware. Apple’s iPad is selling like hotcakes and is no doubt already cutting into Kindle sales.

        But Amazon has a secret weapon: Linux.

        Apple will never, ever release a version of its iBooks application for Linux. Ever.

      • E-reader doubles as digital notepad

        Asus did not list the operating system used by the Eee Tablet, but a Laptop hands-on story claims the device runs a proprietary version of Linux on an ARM processor. In April, Asus and Acer both said they would support the Linux-based MeeGo operating system, with both netbooks and tablets speculated as potential products. However, the Eee Tablet, which does not appear to offer generic tablet features such as web browsing, does not appear to be based on MeeGo.

    • Nokia/MeeGo

      • More software firms line up behind MeeGo

        Also at Computex, prototype MeeGo tablets running on Intel’s Atom Z6xx (“Moorestown”) system-on-chip were shown by Wistron, Compal, Quanta, and CZC, while Acer said it would offer MeeGo on both netbooks and tablets.

    • Android

      • Android SDK targets Atom Z6xx smartphones

        Like the Z6xx system-on-chip (SoC), the Aava platform was said to support Moblin, Android, and the Moblin- and Maemo-based MeeGo Linux distribution. Only Moblin support was initially offered by Aava, but since then, an Aava phone has appeared at the MeeGo project as an early MeeGo reference target for Z6xx-based smartphones (along with an ARM-based Nokia N900 design).

      • Android tablets available in three CPU flavors

        At Computex, Shenzhen-based Joyplus announced four tablets that run Android, only two of which use the same CPU. The five-inch Joyplus M508 and seven-inch 5701 both tap the 624MHz Marvell PXA303, while the seven-inch M702 runs on a 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm MW8505, and the seven-inch M703 uses a 600MHz ARM926 CPU paired with a 600MHz DSP, says Joyplus.

    • Tablets

      • Dell Streak heads stateside as Android tablets mount up at Computex

        Formally announced early last week, the Dell Streak features a five-inch capacitive, multitouch touchscreen with WVGA resolution, a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and voice telephony.

      • Hands On With the Dell Streak

        The Dell Streak, an Android-powered smartphone with a five-inch screen, got a boost at the D8 conference Wednesday night when Dell executive Ron Garriques said it would be available this July, both from a U.S. carrier and direct on Dell.com. We got some time with a nearly final model Thursday, and even made a phone call.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mozilla

    • 10 useful Firefox-based apps
    • Mozilla Introduces sudoSocial

      Mozilla is dipping a toe into social networking with sudoSocial, an early version “stream publishing platform” available through Mozilla Labs.

      The sudoSocial effort is a “stream publishing platform,” which roughly translates to a way to aggregate your social network feeds in one place. Sort of like FriendFeed or Facebook without the comments. A working demo is up on sudoSocial.me, where you can view some of the demo sites or sign up with your own if you like.

  • Oracle

  • Freedom

    • Why open standards, open source, and free software are not the same thing. (And never will be)

      Much like “Open Standard”, the term “Open Source is pretty hollow and vapid. It has been abused and watered down such to the point that a company can release some source code and only give you the ability to look at it, and maybe not you. Microsoft’s Shared Source program is an example of this. Shared Source sounds better than “Closed Source” or “Proprietary”, and they can even have their hobgoblin minions abuse Wikipedia to label everything as “Shared”. Suddenly they aren’t hording it, they’re “Sharing” it.

    • New Handheld Computer Is 100% Open Source

      “While the rest of the industry has been babbling on about the iPad and imitations thereof, Qi Hardware is actually shipping a product that is completely open source and copyleft. Linux News reviews the Ben NanoNote (product page), a handheld computer apparently containing no proprietary technology. It uses a 366 MHz MIPS processor, 32MB RAM, 2 GB flash, a 320×240-pixel color display, and a Qwerty keyboard. No network is built in, though it is said to accept SD-card Wi-Fi or USB Ethernet adapters. Included is a very simple Linux OS based on the OpenWrt distro installed in Linksys routers, with Busybox GUI. It’s apparently intended primarily for hardware and software hackers, not as a general-audience handheld. The price is right, though: $99.”

Leftovers

  • Tech Support from the Other Side of the Phone

    Too often, we tell the person calling in to tech support, “Why didn’t you call earlier?”

  • John Perry Barlow: Internet has broken political system

    The deluge of information available on the Web has made the country ungovernable, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow.

    “The political system is broken partly because of Internet,” Barlow said. “It’s made it impossible to govern anything the size of the nation-state. We’re going back to the city-state. The nation-state is ungovernably information-rich.”

  • Tynt, the Copy/Paste Jerks

    All of this nonsense — the attribution appended to copied text, the inline search results popovers — is from a company named Tynt, which bills itself as “The copy/paste company”.

    It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.

    Everyone knows how copy and paste works. You select text. You copy. When you paste, what you get is exactly what you selected. The core product of the “copy/paste company” is a service that breaks copy and paste.

  • When Reporters Write A Story You Don’t Like, Perhaps Don’t Impersonate Them Asking For Sexual Encounters Or Nude Modeling Jobs
  • Baseball seeks halt to porn, indecency on MLB.com

    Major League Baseball has asked a judge for a subpoena to help it identify people using Internet services provided by Charter Communications Inc to post pornography and other indecent material on the MLB.com website.

  • Abundance

    • Scott Adams: The Economic Value Of Content Is Going To Zero, But Maybe It’s Okay

      Reader Bluejay alerts us to the news that Adams is exploring the topic again, in a slightly tangential manner. In a blog post highlighting his “theory on content value,” where it seems he’s reached something like the “acceptance” stage of navigating this particular topic — though, he’s doing so somewhat grudgingly.

    • How not to save news

      If the FTC wants to reinvent journalism, perhaps it should align with news’ disruptors. But there’s none of that in this report. The word blog is used but once in 35 pages of text–and then only in a parenthetical mention of soccer blogs. Discussion of investing in technology comes on the last page in a suggestion about tools for “improved electronic note-taking.”

    • If Astronomers Can Happily Share The Business With Amateurs, Why Do Some Journalists Get So Upset?

      We were recently talking about some of the strawmen complaints that some (though, certainly not all) journalists put up in protesting the idea of “citizen” journalism (which should, more accurately, be called participatory journalism). One of the bigger strawmen is this idea that people think that amateur journalists mean that professional journalists aren’t needed. There may be someone out there who does believe it, but most supporters of participatory journalism believe the two work together quite well.

    • Newspaper Publisher Defends Filing 22 Copyright Lawsuits Against Sites Who Copied Text… With Links Back

      Except, of course, any fifth grader could point out the obvious difference. Making a copy of your news (and linking back to it) is not “driving off with it.” No one has “driven away” the content. The content on the LVRJ website is still there. Not stolen at all. Might there be “infringement”? It’s possible. But, there are other issues to take into consideration — such as the actual impact on the LVRJ. It’s hard to make any reasonable claim that any of these sites did any damage whatsoever to the LVRJ. In fact, you could argue that all of them helped promote the LVRJ as a publication to follow on these issues.

    • Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution

      Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink have led eerily parallel lives. Both grew up in Midwest university towns in the 1970s, where they spent their formative years watching television after school and at night. Both later went to Yale (a BA in painting for Shirky, a law degree for Pink). And both eventually abandoned their chosen fields to write about technology, business, and society.

      Now their paths are intersecting. In December, Pink, a Wired contributing editor, came out with Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. The book digs through more than five decades of behavioral science to challenge the orthodoxy that carrots and sticks are the most effective ways to motivate workers in the 21st century. Instead, he argues, the most enduring motivations aren’t external but internal—things we do for our own satisfaction.

    • How Monetary Rewards Can Demotivate Creative Works

      The more you think about it, the more this all makes sense, and the more you realize just how screwed up so many incentive structures are today, because so many people think that purely monetary incentives work best.

  • Security/Aggression

    • Police investigate Habbo Hotel virtual furniture theft
    • FTC slaps down keylogger firm

      CyberSpy Software, which markets the controversial RemoteSpy commercial keylogging application, has agreed to rewrite the software and clean up its business practices to settle a case brought by the US Federal Trade Commission.

    • Court Says Border Patrol Can Take Your Laptop For Off-Site Search If They Have Reasonable Suspicion

      For a while now, courts have said that you have no 4th Amendment rights at the border, and border patrol/customs officials have every right to search your laptop. For a variety of reasons, this is problematic. As we’ve explained before, the contents of your laptop aren’t the same as the contents of your suitcase in two very important ways:

      1. You mostly store everything on your laptop. So, unlike a suitcase that you’re bringing with you, it’s the opposite. You might specifically choose what to exclude, but you don’t really choose what to include. With a suitcase, you specifically choose what to include.
      2. The reason you bring the contents on your laptop over the border is because you’re bringing your laptop over the border. If you wanted the content of your laptop to go over the border you’d just send it using the internet. There are no “border guards” on the internet itself, so content flows mostly freely across international boundaries. Thus if anyone wants to get certain content into a country via the internet, they’re not doing it by entering that country through border control.

    • Bruce Shore, Unemployed Philadelphia Man, Indicted For ‘Harassing Email’ To Jim Bunning

      “ARE you’all insane,” said part of one letter Shore sent on Feb. 26 (which he shared with HuffPost). “NO checks equal no food for me. DO YOU GET IT??”

      In that letter he signed off as “Brad Shore” from Louisville. He said he did the same thing in several other messages sent via the contact form on Bunning’s website. “My assumption was that if he gets an email from Philadelphia, who cares?” he said. “Why would he even care if a guy from Philadelphia gets upset?”

      Bunning might not have cared, but the FBI did. Sometime in March, said Shore, agents came calling to ask about the emails. They read from printouts of the messages sent via the contact form and asked if Shore was the author, which he readily admitted. They asked a few questions, and then, according to Shore, they said, “All right, we just wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything to worry about.”

      But on May 13, U.S. Marshals showed up at Shore’s house with a grand jury indictment. Now he’s got to appear in federal court in Covington, Ky. on May 28 to answer for felony email harassment.

  • Environment

    • Hillary Rosen: First The RIAA, Now BP

      For an encore, Ms. Rosen, in her capacity as a managing partner of the London PR firm Brunswick Group, has been hired by BP to put a pretty face on the oil spill in the Gulf. Rosen is in the familiar company of log-rollers: BP has also hired 27 lobbyists who formerly worked in Congress or the executive branch.

  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • EU may monitor searches under guise of child porn prevention

      The European Parliament’s website urging its members to sign Declaration 29 seems well-meaning enough, with a frightened-looking child and a plea to end sexual harassment, child porn, and pedophilia. However, privacy advocates are concerned over a semi-hidden rider on the declaration that allows EU member states to retain data from search engines, essentially eliminating any privacy EU citizens previously had when surfing the Web.

    • Urging MEPs to withdraw their Written Declaration 29 signatures

      Written declaration 29 has been marketed within the European Parliament using a very emotionally loaded picture of a child, and talking about the need to set up an ”early warning system” to combat sexual child abuse.

    • Google to Hand Over Wi-Fi Data to European Regulators

      Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, will begin turning over to European regulators data it mistakenly collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

      The data will be handed over to authorities in Germany, France and Spain, Google said late yesterday in an e-mailed statement.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Texas AG questions e-book publishers

      Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins both told The Wall Street Journal that they had been contacted by the Texas AG’s office, but did not elaborate on the subject of the inquiry. Earlier, book industry publication Publishers Marketplace reported that Apple was the target of the state’s questioning.

    • Texas Questions E-Book Publishers

      The Texas attorney general is making inquiries about the electronic book market, according to people familiar with the matter, a business where pricing recently has been shaken up by Apple Inc. and the way e-books are sold for the iPad.

    • Borders starts offering e-book readers from third parties

      For a while, Amazon and Sony were the only companies that took the e-reader market seriously, but traditional booksellers seem to have decided they need in on the action. One of the largest, Barnes & Noble, launched its own, dedicated hardware, the Nook. Now, Borders has thrown its hat into the ring, and just about everything about its efforts appear to be distinct, starting with the fact that it will sell several devices made by third parties. The biggest hook for this latecomer may be the prices: both of the devices it’s offering so far are under $150.

    • ACS:Law And US Copyright Group Working Together?

      Of course, nothing either firm does has anything whatsoever to do with preventing unauthorized file sharing. It’s all about sending threatening letters and getting people to pay up.

    • EFF, Public Citizen And ACLU Ask Judge To Quash Mass Subpoenas From US Copyright Group

      While companies like Verizon apparently won’t stand up to protect their users’ rights against the ridiculous and overly broad mass copyright infringement lawsuit filings made by a group called US Copyright Group (really a DC-based lawfirm called Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver), Time Warner Cable is pushing back, but mainly on procedural issues — not in any way to stand up for the rights of those being sued. Thankfully, it looks like the EFF, Public Citizen and the ACLU are trying to help out.

    • Copyrights

      • EFF Asks Judges to Quash Subpoenas in Movie-Downloading Lawsuits

        The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked judges in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to quash subpoenas issued in predatory lawsuits aimed at movie downloaders, arguing in friend-of-the court briefs that the cases, which together target several thousand BitTorrent users, flout legal safeguards for protecting individuals’ rights. Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation joined EFF on the briefs filed Wednesday.

      • ‘We Don’t Care What You Do, As Long as the U.S. Is Satisfied’

        David Akin has pointed to a new paper from Blayne Haggart, a doctoral student at Carleton who is focusing on copyright policy in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The paper, being presented this week in Montreal, includes some interesting analysis of digital copyright reforms in each country. Given today’s introduction of the copyright reform bill, of particular significance are comments Haggart obtained from Michele Austin, who served as Maxime Bernier’s chief of staff when he was Industry Minister.

        According to Austin, the decision to introduce U.S.-style DMCA rules in Canada in 2007 was strictly a political decision, the result of pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office desire to meet U.S. demands. She states “the Prime Minister’s Office’s position was, move quickly, satisfy the United States.” When Bernier and then-Canadian Heritage Minister Bev Oda protested, the PMO replied “we don’t care what you do, as long as the U.S. is satisfied.”

      • Carly Simon brewing fresh lawsuit against Starbucks

        The original lawsuit hung on the question over what obligations Starbucks owed Simon. The singer didn’t have any direct contractual relationship with the coffee chain. Instead, her deal was with Hear Music, a separate operating entity that provided Starbucks, its parent company, with albums to distribute in its stores. The singer previously argued that one could connect the dots easy enough such that the parent company had a duty to disclose material decision-making that would have a big effect on the marketing and sales of her album.

      • Publishing Locations Of Pirate Movies Is The Same As Hosting Them

        A movie studio has won a lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In a surprising decision, a court reasoned that by allowing the publication of the location of pirate movie stored on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.

Clip of the Day

Split Pane File Viewing with Nautilus


Microsoft Lies and Apple Lies

Posted in Apple, Deception, Microsoft at 1:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Pinocchio

Summary: How seniors from Microsoft and from Apple lie shamelessly and repeat the lies even after they were proven to be wrong

GNU and Linux are both gaining. Not only the desktop is an area that matters and an increasing number of people will sooner or later come to grips with the changing trends.

There are many areas in the world and several areas of computing where Apple simply does not matter. Apple just happens to target several niches where people spend a large amount of money and Microsoft is clinging onto a desktop monopoly, where both Windows and Office somehow fit the bill and the large majority of the income comes from Western nations.

“They are using the same FUD against GNU/Linux, despite the fact that the same components are being (re)used by almost all distributions.”One emerging market is the area of smartphones, which are converging with devices such as tablets. This is an area where Linux is doing extremely well because of its fine footprint, cost, versatility, and other important traits/factors. Microsoft’s former evangelist Michael Gartenberg [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] has been spreading FUD about Linux for a long, long time, as we last showed here where he made the claim that Android is “fragmenting”. These foes of Android are repeating it over and over again, hoping that it will stick and that trade journals will start parroting the ludicrous claim. They are using the same FUD against GNU/Linux, despite the fact that the same components are being (re)used by almost all distributions.

In any event, Android “fragmentation” is something which Google claims to be a figment of one’s imagination:

Android fragmentation is a conspiracy cooked up by media and pundits, said Dan Morrill, open source and compatibility program manager for Google Android. Morrill noted that people who wrote about the supposed fragmentation problem for Android had different definitions for the term, rendering the description meaningless. Owners of older Android devices who can’t access Google Maps Navigation, Google Gesture Search or Google Earth may disagree.

Here is what McCracken wrote about it. Most journalists accept Google’s claim [1, 2, 3, 4] because describing different versions as “fragmentation” would be like saying that Microsoft Windows is “fragmented” because many people use an operating system from 2001 (XP) while few use Vista 7 and Vista. In short, this whole “fragmentation” FUD does not hold water and it was spread by the Microsoft crowd. For shame.

There are other new examples of Microsoft lies. Here for example is a Microsoft employee repeating the lies which were debunked before:

“Having watched this movie play before, there’s some consistency in the themes,” said Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer relating to history of the netbook – which started off as Linux-based devices, but ended up as 95 pct Microsoft.

That’s a lie. It was refuted even by Dell. But it doesn’t prevent Microsoft from repeating it.

Apple is not an honest company, either. It’s hard to forget Steve Jobs' FUD against Theora and lawsuit against HTC (over Android/Linux). Now watch what Apple is doing in its own Web site:

If you go to Apple’s HTML5 Showcase page and click on any of the demonstrations using, say, Google’s Chrome, you’ll be confronted with a pop-up stating you need Safari to see the demo at work. However, if you compare Safari’s and Chrome’s support for HTML5, you’ll see that Chrome has far better support.

Apple is shooting itself in the foot because it got caught.

And now, for more from Apple’s “we’re more open than all of you” campaign. In an effort to showcase how cool HTML5 and open web standards are Apple has set up a demonstration page on its website.

Here are some more lies from Steve Jobs — lies which are exposed as follows:

“You can’t sell, if you can’t lie!” Many businessmen follow this mantra. Steve Jobs is no exception. He created a misleading myth around Flash that it doesn’t work well on Apple mobile devices thus they were banning Flash.

The truth was something else, far from what Jobs wrote in his some 2000 words blog. Flash is more than a rich-content player, it is a platform. It will enable developers and publishers to run many applications on Mac mobile devices without money being pumped through Jobs’ vaults. Jobs doesn’t want that. He wants a tight control on his devices thus he banned Flash.

[...]

WebKit was not ‘innovated’ or created by Apple. The codebase of WebKit comes from the Free Software project KHTML. Apple took the code base developed my hundreds of developers for free and forked it as WebKit, the layout engine for Apple’s Safari.

Most Apple software is based on code taken from Free Software projects like BSD. I think Steve was way wrong when he said “Google was building off of the open-source WebKit engine, which Apple created”.

So Apple is still taking credit for KDE's work. What are Apple’s employees thinking to themselves? They prefer to rewrite history and pretend KDE never existed, just as Linux likes to put GNU in the past and claim to be the genesis of the Free desktop (never mind BSD too). The sad thing about Apple’s lie is that it’s fooling enough people, especially its fans who propagate these lies.

Microsoft and Apple should be more responsible and stick to facts. If they are found to be incorrect, they should publicly correct themselves and retract. █

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