11.19.12
Posted in Apple at 9:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Steve Jobs’ (and Cook’s) company is still afraid of female anatomy
The other day we wrote about Apple's censorship of software relating to drone strikes. According to Stallman, not just software but also content is being censored by Apple:
Apple dropped from iTunes the erotic novel, The Proof of the Honey, saying it is because of the cover.
Repeated acts of censorship are an additional reason to condemn iTunes, but not the only one. Even if there were no censorship, you ought to refuse to buy from iTunes because it tramples the rights of its own users.
There is nothing too provocative in this cover, which can be seen here. It says:
A publisher has claimed that Apple has removed Salwa Al Neimi’s erotic novel The Proof of the Honey from the iTunes store because its cover – which features part of a woman’s naked back and bottom – is “inappropriate”.
So Apple is not just against sex but also against banal photos of the human body (not genitalia). █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 9:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Software and hardware issues affect not only Surface; Phones running “8″ show that BSOD is universal with Windows
Ever since Nokia got hijacked by Microsoft its stock has been nosediving. Now we learn that the “8″ of mobiles is so defective that many users (among the few who chose this platform) complain:
Windows Phone 8 devices have been available since the beginning of the month and users are starting to report early issues across HTC and Nokia handsets. In a thread over at WPCentral with 143 replies, a variety of HTC 8X users report that handsets randomly reboot while in use. A thread on Microsoft’s own support forums has also gained 50 replies complaining about the issues. The Verge can confirm that an 8X we are testing has rebooted on more than one occasion.
What a disaster. What is also a disaster is this other “8″:
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Steve, both of you, my Little Woman is just an ordinary user of PCs. She runs few applications, does a lot of web-browsing but takes pictures of everything using smart phone, digital camera and web-cam: moonrise, houses, children, relatives, friends… She accumulates thousands of pictures per annum and has ~20K so far on her PC. You can bet she would tolerate no inflexibility in her file-manager. Fortunately she uses Debian GNU/Linux with XFCE4 and she can have as many windows as she wants open to her file-system as she sorts things out, categorizes them, edits them and inserts them in documents, e-mails, and social websites. File-management has been one of the few things that every user of a PC since the 1980s has appreciated. Who are you to limit what a user can do with a PC out of the box? Who are you to force on the world a crippled OS limiting what people can do with their files?
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I have nothing against Microsoft. I happen to think that Windows 7 is a good product and that Windows 8 is a misguided one. I derived these conclusions from first principles of human–computer interaction theory and from watching users in our new research. One doesn’t have to hate or love a company in order to analyze its UI designs.
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How do I hate thee Windows 8? Let me count the ways.
The latter link is SJVN’s review of Vista 8, the platform which Microsoft is failing to sell. Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert and he too slammed Vista 8. It will be remembered as a massive blunder. Now, let’s see what Apple is up to… █
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Posted in Patents at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Selfishness defined
Summary: Patent (and copyright) news of interest and a few remarks on those
Software patents and patent trolls who use them are of great interest to us, so this news about a troll losing its case got our attention and the attention of others who write:
It’s always slightly amusing to watch extreme patent aggressors get hoisted by their own petard and lose a patent lawsuit. Medical device maker, Medtronic, is somewhat famous for its aggressive pursuit of patent infringement claims against others. In one case, a few years ago, a judge overturned a ruling that Medtronic had actually won and then scolded the company’s lawyers, noting that their “conduct was in disregard for the duty of candor, reflecting an attitude of ‘what can I get away with?’”
Here is another setback for a troll:
It has become its own genre of legal writing: angry judges denouncing plaintiffs in file-sharing lawsuits for abusing the legal system. Judges in New York, Florida, and Illinois have all handed down decisions excoriating the tactics of peer-to-peer plaintiffs. The latest addition to the genre comes from Massachusetts federal Judge Leo Sorokin.
The plaintiffs in the case are publishers of pornographic masterpieces like Anal Cum Swappers 2. Sorokin notes that one of the plaintiffs, Patrick Collins, Inc, has filed “John Doe” lawsuits against at least 11,570 defendants. Yet the firm hasn’t converted any of those “John Does” into named defendants at this point—and that’s the first step toward actual litigation.
This one is a copyright troll though:
While copyright trolling cases keep popping up, it’s become quite impressive how many courts are dumping such cases often while slamming the trolls’ strategy. It’s now happened again. A judge in Massachusetts has called out a troll for its “lack of interest in actually litigating.” The case involves porn company Patrick Collins, Inc., which has been involved in a ton of these trolling cases — including some of those linked above — along with another company, Discount Video Center, represented by the same lawyer.
The practice of trolling with software patents sure is spreading to copyrights. We saw some examples before.
Speaking of software patents, watch how they are being used to impede development of medical solutions:
Pattern recognition software company Parascript LLC has received two U.S. patents for its AccuDetect software, which is used to analyze mammograms for suspicious lesions that could indicate breast cancer.
Longmont-based Parascript developed the computer-aided detection software to analyze digital mammography images. The software can identify suspicious areas for possible soft-tissue densities and calcifications, the company said in a press statement.
See, this is something I have great trouble with. First, it is a case of software patents, which is a broad thing preventing many implementations on similar ideas, which are abstract anyway. Secondly, rather than share knowledge on how to save life they simply hoard another monopoly, hoping to have exclusive rights over cancer treatment. This is not the spirit in which I earned my doctorate in Medical Biophysics. If they acquired skills at something, then they can offer services around those. Their implementation is already covered by copyrights, so why seek patent monopolies? █
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Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lawyers in government against citizens’ will
Summary: Urgent call to contact politicians regarding the Unitary Patent and its consequences; reminder of the reality of lawyers’ influence
NOW that it’s almost 3 PM (CET) it’s probably a good time to address a very important subject. Central Europe is currently not allowing software patents, but large corporations are trying to change that. This impacts me professionally and it impacts many others.
Richard Stallman, the father of Free (as in freedom) software, warned about allowing Europe to give a go-ahead to software patents, saying it would eliminate the current advantage European developers have over their counterparts across the Atlantic. He also suggested eliminating litigation over software patents in the US, as covered by a site he helped fund (through the FSF):
Another approach to ending the problems of software patents would be a law saying, as Richard Stallman puts it, “that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement.”
Stallman’s piece in the Wired series had major impact, which we last showed when talking about forums on software patents getting stacked by lawyers and law professors. They’re everywhere in these debates because they’re prominent in politics and they hang around where they can make money at other people’s expense.
Speaking of events about software patents, here is one. On Friday there was this conference:
Preview of Our “Solutions to the Software Patent Problem” Conference
On Friday, we’re having our big academic conference of the semester, “Solutions to the Software Patent Problem.” At the conference, experts will propose their ideas of how to fix software patents. Ultimately, we hope there will be enough enthusiasm among the participants to coalesce around one or more proposals and see if we can actually make progress.
In preparation for the conference, we held a “preview” for the students so that they would understand the conference background better. Without previews like this, students often don’t get as much out of the conference because so much of the discussion goes over their heads. Colleen Chien was supposed to do the preview but she had a major conflict, so I stepped in. Below, I’ve included my talk notes. If you’re really interested, I’ve also posted the audio from the talk. I hope to see you on Friday!
This is a conference dealing with software patents, but it is stacked mostly by “law” people (i.e. lawyers). Groklaw wrote:
I’m so happy to tell you that tomorrow’s conference on what to do about software patents, Solutions to the Software Patents Problem, at the Santa Clara Law’s High Tech Law Institute will be live streamed for those of us who can’t make it in person.
I confess I begged for this, because I know a lot of you are seriously interested in this topic but can’t make it there. So thank you Santa Clara Law. Here’s where you go tomorrow, and it runs all day from 8:50 am to 5:30 pm Pacific time, minus one talk at 9 AM.
To be fair, it was not just a parade of lawyers. This one particular event had notable speakers who are against patents, so unlike some conferences, it was not just law people speaking among themselves. Here is TechDirt:
Patent Office, Perhaps Forgetting What Year It Is, Locks Down Mobile App Development Platforms
I’m spending today at a conference at Santa Clara University’s Law school on Solutions to the Software Patent Problem. It seems only fitting that as this is happening, I’ve been alerted to a completely ridiculous new patent: Appsbar has put out a press release gleefully announcing that it’s been granted a patent on offering a “create your own mobile app” development platform. Stunningly, the patent in question, 8,261,231, was just applied for in February of this year. I’m at a loss as to how a competent patent examiner could possibly think that a mobile app development platform is somehow new or non-obvious in this day and age.
There is more news about the expansion of the patent system to Silicon Valley — something that ought to be criticised. Rather than shrink the system that issues far too many patents, those in charge let it grow further.
One law professor with an actual background in some science is the latest author in the Wired series on patents. John Duffy describes himself as follows:
John Duffy is a professor at Virginia Law School; prior to that, he was a research professor at George Washington University Law School. Duffy was identified as one of the 25 most influential people in the field of intellectual property by The American Lawyer. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics.
The previous contributor, Andrew Chin, is also a law professor and he writes about his case for keeping abstract patents:
Much criticism of software patents is rightly aimed at the use of abstract claim language to cover a wider range of technology than the patentee invented and disclosed. Mark Lemley, for example, highlights “functional” language in claims as particularly problematic, and proposes in this opinion series that a claimed function be limited to the disclosed “program and ones like it.”
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So the utilities of Bilski’s claimed methods are not amenable to one resource-specific causal account, but many. Bilski’s methods perform their hedging functions whether the market participants’ option values are calculated on my office desktop PC or on the London Science Museum’s Difference Engine, and whether their transactions are completed via telephone or website. A patent examiner could simply cite such an observation in rejecting Bilski’s claims as unpatentable subject matter.
A key advantage of my proposed “concrete causation” standard is its consistency with Supreme Court precedents, which allows the Federal Circuit to introduce it without need for legislation. The universal applicability of this approach conforms to our treaty obligations (to make patents available without discrimination as to the field of technology), suggesting it could become an international norm. The approach also upholds what I’ve identified elsewhere as the patent system’s metaphysical commitment to scientific realism.
By design, this proposal explicitly acknowledges that all of the “useful Arts” confront the common problem of having limited resources. This necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. The patent system exists for those working to do more with less, not for those seeking to corner the market on such efforts through abstract claim drafting.
In Europe too we are left to deal with “legal” folks, whose interests lie not in advancing knowledge but in making a lot of money from it, as if the latter somehow takes priority over the former. April asks people to fight back against the bureaucrats by informing them:
The European Parliament just announced an exceptional meeting of the legal affairs (JURI) committee on Monday November 19th, 2012 at 7pm for the only purpose of discussing the unitary patent package. This new unexpected event in the unitary patent saga is a concern. There is an urgent need to get in touch with the MEPs to let them know about the threats of the unitary patent.
We must really ensure that software patents are kept out of Europe, including the loopholes that let Finnish company Tuxera put a patent tax on Linux and Android. Carla Schroder wrote about it the other day:
Microsoft’s creaky old FAT filesystems, FAT16 and FAT32, have long been the de facto standard filesystems for Flash storage devices. They enable portability because FAT is supported on all major operating systems, and they don’t have access controls so there are no permissions hassles– just plug in your device and use it. But despite FAT’s age and ubiquity, Microsoft successfully enforced its FAT patents against TomTom in 2009. TomTom agreed to drop FAT32 support from their products, several of which were built on Linux. Microsoft has also gone after Android vendors, such as Motorola, who use FAT.
The legal landscape, as always, is bizarre. Linux can support FAT32 without paying royalties because of an inane technicality: long and short filenames. My fellow old codgers recall the 8.3 DOS filename convention: filenames could be no more than 8 characters long with a 3-character extension. This collided with grownup filesystems that supported longer filenames, which FAT truncated. And that is why something like nicelongfilename.txt would be shortened to nicelo~1.txt.
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Linux users have options, sort of. Tuxera sells a good exFAT driver, but only to OEMs, such as Android vendors. There is a free exfat driver, fuse-exfat, and it is included in several distros. This is built on fuse, filesystem in userspace. I’ve tested it a bit without problems, but the developers do not have access to any specifications and it’s still young, so it has some rough edges. I would not rely on it for syncing a Linux PC with devices that use exFAT, like cameras and smartphones.
There is prior art there, as Linus Torvalds revealed some months ago. Those patents are essentially bunk. █
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Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 7:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Without speaking to FOSS experts the bureaucrats in Europe consider giving up on ODF and FOSS
EARLIER THIS year we wrote about how OOXML was interfering with FOSS adoption in the German public sector. IDG has
this report which echoes a few others but places little or no emphasis on OOXML. It says:
Several open source groups such as the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Document Foundation and the Open Source Business Alliance protested the plans in an open letter to the council on Friday, saying the council compared apples with oranges.
“Numerous statements concerning LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are incorrect or outdated,” they said in the letter, adding that the support of LibreOffice and OpenOffice is at a professional level these days. “The assessment of the evaluation that compatibility to Microsoft Office cannot be reached in the next few years, is also wrong,” they said.
According to the organizations, no open source experts were consulted in the process. Therefore they hoped the council would still consider a migration to a current version of LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
The council plans to vote on the draft bill next Tuesday.
That is just a few days from now. The cost of lock-in is very high and many managers fail to take this into account. There are 450 comments in Slashdot. The problems in Freiburg are somewhat representative of the excuses made in other places. Microsoft had hired some people whose task is to attack LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org adoption (also see [1, 2, 3]), nut almost nobody in the corporate press reported on that. █
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