03.27.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The ‘civilising’ power of technology without human rights
Drones
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When America invaded Iraq in 2003, it had a couple of hundred; by the time it left, it had almost 10,000.
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A UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration on Thursday to review its use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants abroad and reveal how it chose its targets.
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A UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration today to review its use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants abroad and reveal how it chose its targets.
In its first report on Washington’s rights record since 2006, it also called for the prosecution of anyone who ordered or carried out killings, abductions and torture under a CIA programme at the time of President George W. Bush, and to keep a promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
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Physical risk is the central issue in recent disputes over the Purple Heart and the recognition of drone pilots. The controversies have helped prompt Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to order a yearlong study of how the Pentagon awards its ribbons and medals.
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Peace activist Medea Benjamin spoke to a crowd of Radford University students, faculty and community members last Wednesday evening in McGuffey Hall.
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Trade and the crisis in Ukraine are likely to dominate the agenda during US President Barack Obama’s first official visit to Brussels on March 26.
But the European Union and Nato leaders also should use the summit to press Obama on another critical issue: ensuring that US operations against terrorist suspects, most often carried out with remotely piloted aircraft known as drones, comply with international law.
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The British government should be more transparent about intelligence-sharing that leads to covert drone strikes, say MPs in a report published today.
The call for greater transparency ‘in relation to safeguards and limitations the UK Government has in place for the sharing of intelligence’, came in a report on drones by the Defence select committee. The report acknowledged that intelligence-sharing was outside the committee’s remit and called on the Intelligence and Security Committee to examine the issue.
The report adds that it is ‘vital’ that a ‘clear distinction’ is drawn between UK drone operations and covert strikes such as those conducted by the US in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
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The former chief executive of BT, who is now a senior Government trade minister, is at the centre of a row over Britain’s alleged role in America’s secret drones’ war.
Ian Livingston was head of the telecoms giant when it won a contract to set up a top secret £15m communications link between an RAF base in Northamptonshire and America’s headquarters for drone attacks in Africa. Last year he was made Lord Livingston and four months ago started a high-profile trade job in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
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Mr Livingston was head of the telecoms giant when it won a contract to set up a top secret £15m communications link between an RAF base in Northamptonshire and America’s headquarters for drone attacks in Africa. Last year he was made Lord Livingston and four months ago started a high-profile trade job in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
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Lord Livingston, former CEO of BT, is at the centre of a row over the company’s involvement in America’s secret military drone war, which has killed hundreds of civilians in Yemen.
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The Ministry of Defence needs to be more open about its use of unmanned aerial drones, MPs said yesterday.
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Britain is due to hold its next strategic defence and security review (SDSR) in 2015, the year of a national election.
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Amnesty protesters were dressed in orange jumpsuits – as worn by detainees at the Guantanamo detention centre – when they demonstrated in Brussels on Tuesday.
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The next threat to your privacy could be hovering over head while you walk down the street.
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The 49-foot-by-27-foot sculpture, based on a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator aerial vehicle, is a memorial to civilians killed by unmanned U.S. drones overseas, said artist Joseph DeLappe.
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Drone strikes by the United States seemed to be in the news only sporadically in 2011, when George Brant chanced on a statistic that said the Obama administration was using them at least four times more than the pace they were employed by President George W. Bush. His curiosity ignited, the playwright delved into the subject and emerged with “Grounded,” an award-winning play that explores the life of someone who pushes a kill button while 8,000 miles from the target, then goes home to her family.
Human Rights
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Asylum seekers’ health and education records fabricated in bid to keep contract, Salvation Army worker tells SBS
UK Human Rights
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In January, Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, secured cross-party support for an alarming last-minute addition to the current Immigration Bill, allowing her to strip foreign-born British citizens of their citizenship, even if it leaves them stateless.
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Clegg and Miliband call for reform of Investigatory Powers Tribunal, as critics accuse it of secrecy and unfairness
Censorship Using Threats
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This list is meant as a spiritual successor to the grok.org.uk Full-Disclosure list started by Len Rose and John Cartwright in 2002 and terminated abruptly in March 2014 due to bogus legal threats. We are giving this list a fresh start, so members of the old list need to resubscribe here. “
UK Censorship by Default
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Captain America, Marvel Comics’ World War II supersoldier, is the star of Sky Broadband’s latest advert. And he’s taking a break from fighting 1940s comic book bad guys to promote Sky’s default Internet filters.
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It is against this background, therefore, that we now await the result of a first tier tribunal appeal by TJ McIntyre which took place last week. This appeal is against the Home Office decision not to allow him to view Home Office material on the possible liability they and/or filtering companies would face for wrongful blocking.
FOIA
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It seems, the agencies could have been complicit in the arrest of Nelson Mandela which led to him being incarcerated for 27 years.
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Over the past decade, Ryan Shapiro has become a leading freedom of information activist, unearthing tens of thousands of once-secret documents. His work focuses on how the government infiltrates and monitors political movements, in particular those for animal and environmental rights. Today, he has around 700 Freedom of Information Act requests before the FBI, seeking around 350,000 documents
Ukraine
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Putin doesn’t use cell phones. He doesn’t text. He rarely ventures “into that place where you apparently live, that Internet,” according to Time’s Simon Shuster. And that means that he is “a very hard target for foreign spies.” Sound crazy? Well, you didn’t build your career working for the KGB in a country that was unabashed about spying on its citizens.
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Moscow’s actions in the Crimea are comprehensible, former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt said, criticizing the Western reaction to the peninsula’s reunification with Russia.
President Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Crimean issue is “completely understandable,” Schmidt wrote in Die Zeit newspaper where he’s employed as an editor.
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Russia has taken a fleet of military dolphins trained by the Ukrainian navy, a Russian news agency reports. The Soviet Union’s combat dolphin program has been around since the 1960s, and was handed over to Ukraine after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. The Ukrainian navy had been planning to disband the program next month, but with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the dolphins have a new commander to report to—Vladimir Putin.
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Natalya Poklonskaya, acting Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea, has been put on the wanted list in Ukraine. Her name, birth date and photograph appeared on the list of “persons hiding from the Ukrainian authorities”, according to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s website.
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Ukrainians in the eastern city of Donetsk have voted in an online spoof referendum to secede from Ukraine and join the UK. Residents wrote that their hometown was founded by a Briton, so the UK should seize this “decisive moment” and take them in.
Encryption
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If you were horrified by the revelations of the American National Security Agency (NSA) spying on citizens, world leaders, blue chip technology companies and – oh yeah, the pope – then you’ll be glad that a young researcher working at MIT has developed a way to encrypt all the data that leaves your computer before spies and hackers can get their hands on it.
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Stop living in a fear that the NSA, other government agencies, ISPs and hackers will steal your important data & funny-cat videos. MIT engineer Raluca Popa has built a new platform, called Mylar, that helps you build secure NSA-proof web applications. Most of the web applications typically depend on the servers to store and process the data. Anyone who gets access to the server can get control of entire data and there’s nothing you can do about it. Mylar solves this problem through its unique approach to the problem. Mylar stores the data on the server in encrypted form and decrypts it in the user’s browser. Only the intended user can therefore can use the information.
Privacy of Allies
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It might be time for the National Security Agency director Keith Alexander to come down from the ivory tower where he sits and be put out to pasture. He and his executive staff are in a world or atmosphere that is disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. Just ask our closest allies and their leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Corporations Spying
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The U.S. intelligence community is still playing word games with us. The NSA collects our data based on four different legal authorities: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and modified in 2004 and 2008, Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. Be careful when someone from the intelligence community uses the caveat “not under this program,” or “not under this authority”; almost certainly it means that whatever it is they’re denying is done under some other program or authority. So when De said that companies knew about NSA collection under Section 702, it doesn’t mean they knew about the other collection programs.
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Snowden
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Jimmy Carter said that if Edward Snowden were to be convicted and given a death sentence, he would consider pardoning the National Security Agency leaker. He noted, however, that he doesn’t feel he has enough information to judge the extent of the damage Snowden may have done to U.S. national security interests.
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Reform
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Perhaps the most significant component of the proposal is one that has been buried in the media coverage. The new legislation will reportedly require telecommunications companies to give the NSA access to cell phone records, a central preoccupation of the spy agency. US officials disclosed in February that only about 30 percent of all call records are available to the NSA because of the widespread use of cell phones, which have up to now not been part of the information handed over to the government.
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The House parliamentarian, who oversees procedural matters, has determined that a new bill that substantially modifies the seminal 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will go through the intelligence committee rather than the judiciary committee, a move that two congressional aides consider “highly unusual.”
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So President Obama is finally ready to do something about the government storage of our phone records, preparing legislation for Congress that would partially change the National Security Agency’s bulk collection. Except he’s missing something much more important: all of the other, much more revealing data we generate simply by living our daily lives. What about all of the other data that internet companies buy and sell, and that yet more companies create and sell without even telling us – indeed, all of the rest of a data retention program that you and I helped build?
Facebook Joke
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Facebook may want to become the Internet (as The Verge hypotheses), the real Internet – the geeks – don’t have a very good reputation of The Social Network. The dearth of any geeks on Facebook and mass exodus to Google + shows how much geeks love Facebook. The irony, for Facebook, is that these geeks are the future of the Internet, these geeks play a major role in success or demise of any product and they are not fond of Facebook – this acquisition has showed a very grim picture of Facebook.
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Oculus VR Inc. co-founder Palmer Luckey called Facebook Inc.’s $2 billion purchase of his virtual-reality headset company a move that will help transform industries. Some fans weren’t so upbeat.
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The creator of the popular video game says the social network creeps him out
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Perrson is not alone in his criticism of the Facebook deal. Virtual reality enthusiasts were quick to blast the planned acquisition on Twitter after it was announced, Adweek points out.
Torture
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Multiple national security leaks by US officials occurred during the production of the Oscar-nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty, which dramatized the hunt for Osama bin Laden that ended in his execution. But, when the Pentagon Inspector General’s office investigated what had happened, the office found then-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta had mishandled classified information.
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We already know the CIA misled the Justice Department
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The CIA’s own account of the Bush-era interrogation techniques has been refuted by independent organizations
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Announcements
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The GNOME Project is proud to release GNOME 3.12 today. The next milestone release in the GNOME 3 series includes many new features, enhancements and updates, as well as new capabilities and APIs for application developers. The new version continues to improve the GNOME 3 user experience and includes many small bug fixes and enhancements.
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Packaging
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As a result of the work that has been going into increasing the portability of GNOME this cycle, I’m happy to announce the availablility (on “day 0″) of a virtual machine image of GNOME 3.12.0 running on FreeBSD.
New Features
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GNOME 3.12 was released today and it includes some important changes such as proper HiDPI support, improved Wayland support, various enhancements for the core GNOME applications as well as 3 new preview applications.
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1 new GNOME Videos, 1 updated Bluetooth panel, 2 new thumbnailers, 9 grilo sources, and 1 major UPower rework.
I’m obviously very attached to the GNOME Videos UI changes, the first major UI rework in its 12-year existence.
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Pre-release
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Tarballs are due on 2014-03-24 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.12.0 newstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.12.0. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!
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I wanted to make one more post before the imminent release of 3.12 showing how gedit changed in this cycle, but the recent series of posts by Matthias feature plenty of gedit images and left me without fresh screenshot material
Boxes
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I just rolled out Boxes 3.11.92, which is going to become 3.12 in a week. Apart from lots of fixes and minor improvements like addition of keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility for example, there are some note worthy changes against 3.10
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Ubuntu
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So I did a bit more hacking on PackageKit, appstream-glib and gnome-software last night. We’ve now got screenshots from Debian (which are not very good) and long application descriptions from the package descriptions (which are also not very good). It works well enough now, although you now need PackageKit from master as well as appstream-glib and gnome-software.
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Steve Langasek of Ubuntu Technical Board had raised his concerns when the proposal was made, “I am very concerned about this proposed support timeline. 2 years and 3 months means that the support period would end the same month that 16.04.1 is likely to be released. Given that our policy has been to not recommend (or advertise in the UI) LTS upgrades until the first point release, this effectively gives users zero margin between the dropping of security support for Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04, and the first upgrades to Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04.
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Posted in Dell, Microsoft, Patents at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Campaign of intimidation against Linux fueled by Dell, too
Summary: The dying computer assembly company is joining a notorious attack on GNU/Linux as if it is trying to appease Microsoft rather than today’s generation, which increasingly embraces GNU- and Linux-based platforms
Last year we called for boycott of Dell and at the end of the year we gave more reasons for it. Dell had done a disservice to Free software for a number of years and in 2007 it joined the Microsoft/Novell deal, perhaps implying (but never explicitly saying so) that it will play a role in putting patent tax on GNU/Linux.
“Dell did not have to do this, but it chose to.”Now that Windows (Microsoft’s common carrier) is in real trouble because many users are exposed to crackers other than the NSA (to which Microsoft provides back doors) Microsoft is very much focused on trying to scare vendors (and people, who usually rely on these vendors) away from GNU/Linux.
Chrome OS is a GNU/Linux distribution, possible the most widely used of its kind, so Microsoft has been running attack ads (smear campaigns) against it. In addition, adding to reasons to boycott Dell (Microsoft took over at least part of Dell and it has been getting worse since), Dell is reportedly joining Microsoft’s extortion and intimidation campaign against Android and Chrome OS. Dell did not have to do this, but it chose to. “Without disclosing too many details,” writes Monika Bhati, “the companies said they have agreed to license each company’s applicable intellectual property related to three product lines: Android, Chrome OS and Xbox.”
Monika Bhati’s softball ‘article’ is just parroting claims from press releases without investigating any further or at the very least checking what’s true and what’s FUD. This article repeats the unsubstantiated claims that Microsoft makes billions of dollars this way, despite lack of any actual evidence (the real goal is to deter against GNU/Linux adoption). She is not alone in it and we need to stop this. This whole thing is typical cross-licensing, intended for the most to disguise the reality of finances, as in Novell’s case (I spent years of my life researching this, so I recognise these patterns).
One must wonder: where is OIN in all this? The OIN brags about adding Verizon to its ranks this week, but it does absolutely nothing to stop Microsoft’s racketeering campaign. The OIN’s CEO, whom I spoke to several times over the phone, is quote as saying: “We appreciate Verizon’s industry thought leadership in joining OIN and supporting patent non-aggression in Linux. We believe Verizon is a bellwether for other communications service providers from an open-source and intellectual-property perspective, and look forward to working with other carriers so they can similarly come to understand the benefits of participation in the OIN community and partake of this growing culture of patent non-aggression.”
Mr. Bergelt is quoted as saying that he is into “non-aggression in Linux,” so how come he does nothing at all to stop the racketeering against OIN members like Google? This is beyond useless and the OIN will never even lobby against software patents because its large members are in favour of them. Some of them are very much part of the problem.
People need to vote with their wallets. The Linux Foundation and OIN are not going to save or preserve freedom in GNU/Linux; they don’t prioritise this. One is a mutual pact not to sue and another is a branding operation (employing for the most part marketing and branding professionals). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Collaboration Summit
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At an exclusive gathering at the Linux Collaboration Summit, some of the crème de la crème of Linux developers talked about what’s going on with the Linux kernel today.
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Open source software was first introduced in the enterprise by developers who used it in secret. CIOs and other managers would assert there wasn’t any open source within their walls only to uncover multiple skunkworks projects built on and with open source. Over the last decade, the use of open source software and tools has gone mainstream and today developers and managers alike understand and reap the benefits. Today no one gets fired for using open source.
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At the Linux Foundation’s Linux Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only event for top Linux and open source developers, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Foundation, said in the keynote: “Open source will be the new Pareto Principle.” By that, he meant that 80 percent of technology value—whether it’s from smartphones, TVs, or IT—will be coming from open source software development with only 20 percent coming from proprietary programming.
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Companies are increasingly turning to collaborative software development to build their products and services and speed innovation, keynote presenters at Collaboration Summit told us this morning. But how does this process actually happen? Open source directors from Intel, Citrix and the OpenDaylight Foundation shared some of their secrets of collaborative development in an afternoon panel discussion, moderated by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. Below is an edited version of the conversation, which covers the rise of open source foundations, how to attract top engineering talent, how to manage open source developers, and more.
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Open source and collaborative software development has evolved in recent years to become an essential part of technology industry innovation, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin in his opening keynote at Collaboration Summit today.
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Kicking off one week’s time will be the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley, California.
Releases
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Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the eighth and most likely the last Release Candidate in the 3.14 branch of the kernel, although this should have been the final version.
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Kernel Misc,
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systemd 212, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts, which provides aggressive parallelization capabilities and uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, has been released and is now available for download.
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Alejandra Morales announced the Cryogenic Linux kernel module on the LKML today. Cryogenic aims to reduce system power consumption by “enabling cooperative clustering of I/O operations among the various applications that make use of the same hardware device. In order to achieve this target, Cryogenic provides an API that enables applications to schedule I/O operations on SCSI and network devices at times where the impact the operations have on energy consumption is small.”
Wayland
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Originally XWayland served as an X.Org module by which modified DDX hardware drivers could be loaded on the system so they could offer their 2D support. However, given the advancements of GLAMOR, that is being used instead so we can have one unified XWayland DDX without the need for having patched drivers for hardware support and should work on just about any platform that has OpenGL support. GLAMOR tends to still be slower than the hand-written 2D paths in the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-intel DDX, but there’s still a lot of optimizations and code rewrites taking place of the code now that it’s moved from being a standalone library to living within the X.Org Server.
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The Ozone-Wayland developer team is proud to announce our next source release based on Chromium 35.0.1897.8.
Display Server Debate
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Canonical showed wisdom recently by dropping its own Upstart and chose systemd which it initially criticized as NIH, invasive and ‘hardly justified’. The Free Software community is expecting that Canonical will show prudence and drop their MIR and adopt Wayland. Canonical has great ambitions with Ubuntu, their struggle is much bigger so it may be wise for them to use limited engineering talent to tackle the issues Ubuntu is facing in desktop and mobile space by using the technologies being develop by the larger Free Software community.
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Robert Ancell, a Canonical employee and Mir developer, wrote a blog post yesterday entitled “Why the display server doesn’t matter.” In the personal blog post, Ancell argues that for too many years the X display server has been in use but finally we’re reaching two new contenders for next-generation display servers: Mir and Wayland-based compositors. Robert Ancell states, “The result of [applications accessing the display server via a tool-kit and hardware/drivers becoming more generic] is the display server doesn’t matter much to applications because we have pretty good toolkits that already hide all this information from us. And it doesn’t matter much to drivers as they’re providing much the same operations to anything that uses them (i.e. buffer management and passing shaders around).”
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AMD
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This week I was out at the Game Developer’s Conference not with a focus on games but to learn about some changes they AMD currently pursuing for their Linux driver model. If this new Linux driver model goes through, the Catalyst Linux driver will be more open, but it’s not without some risk. Read more in this Phoronix exclusive story.
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Intel
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XenGT is designed just not for 3D graphics acceleration within guest instances but also for media acceleration and GPGPU compute acceleration. There’s use-cases for XenGT within cloud computing, data centers, rich virtual clients, multi-screen infotainment, and other areas. With other Xen GPU pass-through solutions there is no ability for both the host and guest operating systems to each access the same GPU simultaneously but they must be independently assigned at this time as there isn’t a guest virtual GPU driver as in the case of VMware SVGA2 or VirtualBox Chromium. With Intel’s XenGT solution, however, there is sharing support — multiple VMs can access the same graphics processor due to its full virtualization. XenGT is pushed as offering performance, features, and sharing capabilities.
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This tool allows easy installation of drivers for Intel graphics hardware. The newer version is available for Ubuntu 13.10 and Fedora 20 users only. Ubuntu 13.04 /Fedora 19 users can install this utility but they won’t receive upgrades to newer Graphics Stack. This utility doesn’t support versions below Ubuntu 13.04 and Fedora 19. Support for 13.04 will be dropped next month with the release of 14.04.
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While there have been pre-releases of the xf86-video-intel 3.0 X.Org driver going back to last September, it’s still not ready to be released, but a new feature update was made available.
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NVIDIA
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For current and potential owners of NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards that are curious about the graphics driver situation on Linux, under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the latest open and closed-source NVIDIA drivers with the latest “Kepler” and “Maxwell” graphics cards. Here’s what you need to know now if trying to use the open-source Nouveau driver with these very latest NVIDIA graphics processors.
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Nouveau’s main set of open-source NVIDIA Linux driver changes for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been merged into drm-next, but don’t get your hopes up too high.
If you were hoping there was finally proper re-clocking / dynamic power management or other breakthroughs for this open-source NVIDIA Linux GPU driver, there isn’t anything real exciting like that for end-users with Linux 3.15. The main changes to this drm-nouveau-next pull is the first stage of ongoing GPU fault recovery support, initial support for the Maxwell GPUs, and various fixes throughout the entire driver.
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds criticized Nvidia in 2012 at Aalto Talk as “the single worst company we have ever dealt with.” Along with him many other members of the open source community previously criticized Nvidia’s proprietary hardware and software, which made open source alternatives difficult.
Overlap
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NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD are not always rivals and they proved that by organizing a joint panel at the Game Developer Conference 2014 in San Francisco to explain to developers how they can unlock the amazing potential of OpenGL.
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Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 7:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The Microsoft Movement is once again polluting the Internet with disinformation, very much as intended
Summary: The President of the Open Source Initiative chastises Microsoft (and press/media) for promoting the lie that Microsoft products have been made Open Source or anything along those lines
A COUPLE of days ago we quoted some tweets which were posted by Simon Phipps, the head of the Open Source Initiative and a friend of the Free Software Foundation (he has done a fantastic job bridging the gap between those two camps). Phipps quickly rebutted appealing reports that Microsoft had manufactured to make it sound as though Windows was being open-sourced. The average, non-technical person would be susceptible to accepting the lie, especially when Microsoft-friendly magazines amplify it. What Microsoft did should hardly be treated as news at all. It’s a non-event. The code which was proprietary is still proprietary, it’s just being imposed on the public through a public museum.
A short while ago Phipps followed it up, turning the messages from his tweets into an article at IDG. “Look all you want, but don’t think about touching Microsoft’s source code for MS-DOS v1.1/v2.0 and Microsoft Word v1.1″ says the summary of the article “Microsoft didn’t really open-source MS-DOS” (the word “really” is spurious).
We have already identified some silly headlines that falsely argued Microsoft “open-sourced” the software, but we won’t link to them as that would only serve as a megaphone to falsehoods.
Well done, Microsoft. You sure managed to coordinate message injection into the media, with lots of lies posted all over the Internet (to be absorbed by lesser-technical people). This is why Microsoft can never be a friend of Free/Open Source software. All that Microsoft seems to be doing is openwashing proprietary software using plugs and hooks that may or may not be genuinely “open” (unlike the software they are tied to or depend on, e.g. Hyper-V). The confusion created by Microsoft serves Microsoft in numerous ways: 1) it weakens the label “Open Source”; 2) it makes Microsoft products seem indistinguishable from FOSS; 3) it helps careless adoption of patent-encumbered concepts such as .NET (e.g. Mono) and FAT, which in turn facilitates litigation (extortion) against companies that adopt GNU/Linux, passing Microsoft tax to customers who never chose Microsoft. █
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Posted in Antitrust, GNU/Linux, Google, Hardware, Microsoft at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Chih-Wei Huang, widely known for his role in the Chinese Linux Documentation Project and Chinese Linux Extensions, wants the Justice Department to investigate Google because Asus, his employer, does not ship Android on Intel hardware
ECT, going by the name Linux Insider, has just published this article about Android-x86 — a project that mostly helps a convicted monopoly abuser (Intel) interject itself into Linux/Android.
The article is very negative about Google and it speaks of complaints for abuse in a Free software project. We have seen such stuff before and it usually turns out to be provocation. It has been very typical for Microsoft people to do so, or even Microsoft proxies such as Nokia. It’s often provocation against Google using forks that don’t obey simple rules, or simply lead to FUD, patent taxation, and even severe privacy issues like NSA/Microsoft Skype.
“Sadly enough, ECT only quotes people who are against Google. No balance is offered, not even an attempt at balance.”Dealing with the core of the article from ECT, it says that the “maintainer of the Android-x86 Project has suggested that the Justice Department should investigate whether Google has been interfering with adoption of the open source code his community is developing.”
This is attributed to Chih-Wei Huang, which is a common name in places like Taiwan. There is Dr. Chih-Wei Huang, who worked 5+ years in Washington/Redmond (with Microsoft payroll), but he is not to be confused with this guy (same full name and even the same username in the same country) that has a good track record when it comes to Free software in China and Taiwan. We already know of former Microsoft staff like Xuxian Jiang, who pretend to be researching Android but are actually FUD mills against Android. But this one guy has nothing to do with Microsoft, unlike Dr. Chih-Wei Huang (see his revealing CV).
According to ECT, Huang said (to ECT): “Asus announced the dual OS laptop TD300LA in the CES and got very positive feedback. However, Google asked to stop the product so Asus are unable to ship it, sadly.”
This doesn’t sound right. Days ago we covered this and it was actually Microsoft that put the kibosh on the project (see the links here), not just Google as previously (and perhaps even falsely) reported. Neither party wanted to support this product. Several publications reported on that. So why is Huang picking only on Google?
Sadly enough, ECT only quotes people who are against Google. No balance is offered, not even an attempt at balance. There is no approach for comment from Google. It only says: “Asus executives did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Huang’s assessment of the alleged thwarted hardware release. Google officials several times declined requests for interviews to discuss the Android-x86 Project.”
What about Asus then? Maybe he should ask Asus (according to Wikipedia his current employer) for more information before accusing Google. What does Google have to lose here? Motivation is too weak for this theory to make sense. If anyone has reasons to interfere here, it would be ARM (UK-based) or Nvidia (also external to Asus).
Asus already ships a lot of Android (e.g. the Nexus 7), so only hardware limitation is the mystery here. Intel’s x86 is notoriously unsuitable for mobile devices, especially due to heat, size, and energy consumption. Intel’s “Atom” was a massive failure; heads were rolling. In fact, Google would generally be wise to avoid or to dodge those chipsets that put Windows to shame (heavy, clumsy, not running for long). But it doesn’t mean that Google intervened; in fact, maybe Asus reached those same conclusions on its own.
Five years ago when Asus announced a Linux-booting device (Android Eee PC, running Linux/Android) is was most seemingly killed because pressure from Microsoft, not Google (just read what the head of Asus said at the time).
It seems likely that Huang is barking up the wrong tree. We are eager to give Google the benefit of the doubt here because looking at the track record of Android, there tend to be provocations every now and then, trying to portray Android as “not open” (common line from Apple and Microsoft), abusive, monopolistic, etc. Almost every time this type of claims floods the media it eventually turns out to be bogus and often it ends up revealing an embarrassing link to Microsoft (which shamelessly runs anti-Google smear campaigns). █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Servers at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why having Windows in the datacentre (at any level other than a guest machine) is a serious security issue, not to mention hosting in datacentres like Microsoft’s and Amazon’s (in Washington, United States)
WE HAVE been speaking to some leaders or contributors (commercial) of Apache projects that relate to news about Hyper-V support in CloudStack 4.3 [1,2]. Apache, as we have shown before, got a little too friendly towards Microsoft after Microsoft had paid Apache, but that’s not the point worth making. The point to be made here is that Apache neglects to take into account what Hyper-V actually is. Hyper-V is proprietary software which runs on a platform with NSA back doors (hence, via the host/master, it can provide back door access to FOSS and GNU/Linux guests/VMs also). To allow Microsoft to lure FOSS users into Hyper-V is very much misguided, even irresponsible. Hosting a “secure” GNU/Linux server under Microsoft Hyper-V is like mounting a tank on a hovercraft at sea. The Windows back doors were confirmed by Edward Snowden's leaks last year. It must be stressed that access to Windows implies access to Hyper-V (no matter if the drivers/shims/hooks are Free software). The Apache community should know better, but it helps facilitate Microsoft power (domination) over FOSS in this case. Remember what OpenStack did to Hyper-V [1, 2].
“The Apache community should know better, but it helps facilitate Microsoft power (domination) over FOSS in this case.”It is worth adding that if/when hosting on a third party, then the host matters too (the company doing the hosting, not the hosting software). Hosting in Azure, for example, guarantees no privacy and security at all [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], even if one uses a robust GNU/Linux distribution. Microsoft does not respect clients’ privacy and it even intrudes clients' private data for business reasons, nothing at all to do with security. According to Netcraft’s recent report, “Microsoft [is] neck and neck with Amazon in Windows hosting” and it is worth repeating the fact that nobody should use Amazon for GNU/Linux hosting (for similar reasons, not just because Amazon is an exceedingly malicious company but also because it’s a top CIA partner and a surveillance/censorship platform, as revealed by the likes of Wikileaks). At work, where I’m forced to work with some systems on AWS, I habitually receive marketing SPAM from Amazon (even earlier today) and I never assume any privacy at all. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Posted in Deception, Europe, FUD, Google, Microsoft at 6:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Misinformed by Microsoft in attack ads
Summary: New leaks, and not just leaks from Edward Snowden, show that Microsoft is abusing people’s privacy in E-mail, so the ASA should put an end to Microsoft’s anti-Google ads
IN THE UK we have the ASA, which helps crack down on excessively deceiving advertising (almost all commercials are deceiving by design, but some are very blatantly lying). In the past we wrote about the ASA in relation to Microsoft. Microsoft is lying in a very gross way.
There is one particular type of adverts in the UK these days which can annoy me quite a lot. They are not Microsoft ads, they are anti-Google ads, sponsored by Microsoft (as Microsoft is promoting Penn, this is now their strategy). I heard those ads and complained about them before, citing the ASA as the body that needs to receive formal complaints about this. Well, what I didn’t know is that several Brits had already reported these to the ASA, noting that FUD campaigns as the business model are not acceptable, especially when the smears/FUD are untrue, or even libelous. According to a new report from the British media: “”At issue was a radio advertisement that limped onto the air as part of Microsoft’s hoary Scroogled campaign. In a voice-over, Microsoft used Pig Latin to disguise its criticism of its rival and then dwelled on that to make Outlook look like the better option.
“”A radio ad, for Microsoft Outlook, began with a character who stated, ‘may ivatepray e-mailway isway onway ofway eirthay usinessbay’,” explained the ASA.
“”The voice-over then stated ‘Pig Latin may be hard to understand, but you probably need it if you use Gmail, because Gmail scans every word of your emails to sell ads. But Outlook.com doesn’t. And you can choose to opt out of personalised ads. To stop Gmail from using your e-mails, use Outlook.com. Learn more at KeepYourEmailPrivate.com and keep your e-mails ivatepray’.”
“Catchy, snappy stuff, but it did not sit nicely with a couple of people who complained to the ASA about the ad taking liberties with the truth. It was suggested that while Microsoft did not make this clear, it scans its users’ emails too.”
Now, guess what? The ASA did nothing! Microsoft was allowed to get away with it because “the ad made no claims (whether explicit or implied) that Outlook.com did not use any other form of e-mail scanning.” (source)
This is “bizarre in light of recent revelations about Microsoft mail and chat,” said iophk, alluding to revelations that we covered earlier this month.
Perhaps it’s time to resubmit (or amend) the complaints to the ASA, citing documents leaked after Syrian crackers showed FBI-Microsoft relationships, in addition (consequently) to Microsoft’s admission that it is snooping on people and their E-mails for business reasons, not even national security reasons. This can at least lead Microsoft to dropping these false (or at best hypocritical) ads that pollute the British media and aggravate many Brits (rightly so). █
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