03.01.13
Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
FRAND is the opposite of FRIEND
Summary: Notable cases against Android (Apple and Microsoft tag-team maneuverers) face new challenges as opinion shifts against FRAND, the software patents tax trick
Pamela Jones has composed this post which provides a summary of some of the latest developments in the Motorola case, where Microsoft has been trying to use FRAND to its advantage against Android. Here is the latest:
We find out now what the additional evidence is that caused Judge James L. Robart in Seattle to reopen the November trial in Microsoft v. Motorola and to ask for further briefing on the Google-MPEG LA license. Motorola just informed [PDF] the Seattle court that it has accepted Microsoft’s August 2012 offer of payment for Motorola’s German patents. It attaches as Exhibit A the agreement [PDF] and a cover letter [PDF], Exhibit B, it sent to Microsoft’s German lawyer, saying it accepts the prior offer. Motorola tells Judge Robart, “These are the documents discussed at the telephonic conference with the Court on February 12, 2013.”
Apple, in the mean time, has been using FRAND against Android as well. Koh wishes to put a halt to this:
Judge Lucy Koh has asked both tech giants to put their latest smartphone patent case on hold while an appeals court reviews an earlier judgement.
Here is Jones’ reposted report, a “Report from the Apple v. Samsung II Markman Hearing.”
The Markman hearing in Apple v. Samsung II was Friday, the 21st. And now we are really entering the darkest part of the patent woods. It doesn’t get any more exasperatingly detailed than at a Markman hearing. But as usual with legal matters, the more you force yourself to examine the details, the more you get out of it and the more enjoyable it eventually becomes.
At the hearing, the presiding judge, the Hon. Lucy Koh, told the parties they have to narrow their cases against each other to 25 patent claims against 25 products, with more narrowing to come. And she asked if it would be wise to just table this case until the Federal Circuit rules on a pending appeal. Samsung told the judge it will, in fact, be offering a motion to do exactly that, but Apple piped up that it will oppose that motion.
Apple’s court win against Samsung has just been axed in half, so it’s a step in the right direction following the original travesty.
CCIA, quite helpfully, has meanwhile joined forces with some players who seek to limit the use of FRAND in litigation:
The CCIA and RIM Tell the FTC Banning Injunctions for FRAND Patents Can Make Smartphone Wars Worse
If the government wants to build a highway and your house is in the way of the highway, what happens?
Does the government come and tell you, “You have to move out and abandon the house. Sorry for the loss of the value of your house, but that’s life. The public interest comes ahead of your individual property rights.”
Is that how it works?
Of course not. The government may be able, under certain circumstances, to tell you to move in order to build the highway, but it has to *pay* you reasonable compensation. You don’t have to just gulp and swallow such a loss. Why? Because no one, not the government or anyone, has the right to rob you of your property rights. It’s your house. You paid money for it, and if they take it away to benefit the larger good, you should at least be paid compensation.
Well done, Groklaw, for useful analysis of all this. The press scarcely covers these issues. █
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Posted in Antitrust, Courtroom, Microsoft, Novell at 5:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Novell’s site (front page) looks like this today:
Summary: Even though Novell was sold, the brand continues to have some output under certain circumstances
Novell, the company that we first targeted in this Web site (way back in 2006), is still pursuing justice in the WordPerfect case. This is perhaps Novell’s last legacy. Pamela Jones has this update on the case:
Novell has now filed its reply brief [PDF] with the US Court of Appeals for the 10th District. Here’s Microsoft’s brief and Novell’s opening brief in its appeal in the WordPerfect antitrust case against Microsoft.
Novell’s arguments are clear and powerful. “A reasonable jury could find that Microsoft’s conduct was anticompetitive because it harmed Novell, was not competition on the merits, and was reasonably capable of contributing significantly to maintaining Microsoft’s monopoly power in the operating systems market,” Novell writes. Nowhere, it says, does Microsoft defend Microsoft’s conduct as competition on the merits. And Microsoft’s brief neglected to mention to the appeals court, or respond to, the District Court’s conclusion that a jury could have found Microsoft’s justifications for its conduct “to be pretextual.” Worse, Microsoft is asking the appeals court to confer immunity on it “for deception of competitors regardless of the effect on competition.”
By withdrawing its support for namespace extension APIs, Microsoft destroyed Novell’s economic viability, and it did it on purpose to harm a competitor. The Bill Gates email [PDF] proves it, they believe. The whole point of documenting APIs and releasing betas is to induce reliance, so Microsoft can’t credibly argue that it didn’t know this change on its part would impact Novell negatively.
And again, as in Novell’s opening brief (p. 38, footnote 5), Novell references Microsoft using a “deceptive script” which it says is mentioned in the email thread in which a Microsoft employee reported to his company that WordPerfect appeared to be “OK” with the change. Novell says was used to justify the change and persuade companies like Novell that Microsoft had to make the change. (Cf. this Groklaw article and this email thread [PDF] for context.) I’m sure we’ll hear more about this at oral argument. So if you attend the event, and I know some of you are trying to make arrangements to attend, please watch for this in particular.
And then Novell says Microsoft ignored a great deal of the evidence that favors Novell, and so did the District Court, but the applicable standard for summary judgment under Rule 50 is that the court was required to view the evidence in the light most favorable to Novell, which it failed to do. Microsoft also ignored evidence that its conduct harmed competition in the operating systems market, including evidence from binding Findings of Fact from the US v. Microsoft case, and the testimony and statements of Microsoft executives (cf. Groklaw). And finally, Microsoft disregarded applicable substantive law, Novell argues.
Novell was sold to Attachmate, but the Novell brand lives on. There is this new post about a Novell-branded product which Novell boasts about at novell.com:
Adding to the existing Novell File Management Suite, Novell File Reporter 2.0 integrates with both eDirectory and Active Directory to simultaneously report on Novell and Microsoft network folder and file data and corresponding file rights.
This product was even announced in Novell’s Web domain. Not too long ago Novell tried telling us that it was not dead. For most purposes, however, it is just a brand owned by Attachmate and it’s the name of the claimant in the case against Microsoft. Novell’s board has been sued for selling the company. █
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02.27.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Makers of Linux-based operating systems have been letting you boot Fedora, Ubuntu, and other popular software from a removable CD, DVD, or flash drive for years. Now you can use your Android phone instead.
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The governmental IT supplier for schools in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg has committed to stop development of its in-house Linux-based school server software paedML in favour of a new solutionGerman language link based on Univention’s UCS@schoolGerman language link product. This move was originally announced by the government organisation at the end of 2012; the intention was to reduce the workload on the teachers developing and supporting the software by outsourcing this work to a commercial company. UCS@school is based on version 3.1 of the open source Univention Corporate Server.
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Free Software means nobody can stop you doing whatever you want with the software³, but this also protects the developers’ rights to do whatever they want. Nothing they change (even GNOME 3) can actually infringe that freedom, even if you don’t like it.
So: there may be legitimate criticisms of new software like pulseaudio or juju (or GNOME 3 or the new anaconda), but any complaint along the lines of “the developers are taking our freedom/choices away!” is 100% rhetorical nonsense.
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Reglue is no different. From picking up and diagnosing donated computers to taking care of vehicles, coordinating volunteers and making sure computers get into the hands that need them, sometimes the little things can slip below the horizon.
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On my test machine table, I have Google’s brand new Chromebook Pixel. Beside it, I have what had been the fastest Chromebook before it, the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook. Is the Pixel better? Yes. No question about it. But, here’s the real question: Is it $850 better?
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For the first time, both hiring mangers (850) and Linux professionals (2,600) were surveyed in the 2013 Linux Jobs Survey & Report, which forecasts and provides a comprehensive view of the Linux career landscape, including business needs and personal incentives.
The report also includes insights into why employers are seeking Linux talent now and what the top incentives are for Linux professionals.
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Desktop
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There are plenty of reasons to not want to spend $1450 on the Chromebook Pixel, but most of them are an extension of the fact that Chrome OS hasn’t grown up enough to replace a traditional OS. Fortunately, Google’s new BIOS makes it easier to work around the native operating system than any Chrome OS hardware before it.
The main appeal of the Samsung Chromebook and its ilk has been price. For $250, you could afford to pick one up and see if you were going to like it. You could give one as a gift to that family member who considered it a biological imperative to click on every link they came across, leaving you to scrub the shame off of their hard drive the next time you were over for a visit.
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I’m a huge fan of Dan Gillmor. As a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, he was on top of a lot of great tech stories. His book, We the Media, was an incredibly accurate prediction of where American journalism was heading in the early part of this century. And he’s been very public about his move to Linux. So I’m pretty psyched to have his participation here.
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I’ve been searching for a new laptop for a very long time. My old Dell Inspiron 6400 has served me very well for over four years, but about a year ago I decided I needed a refresh. I finally decided upon the Dell XPS but it was a hard journey coming to that decision! Read on for a little bit more background about why I picked this laptop on how Mageia runs on it!
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Server
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As enterprises move to adopt private clouds in the backend, Linux will increasingly become the operating system of choice for server infrastructures in Australia, according to IDC research director Matthew Oostveen.
In financial year 2012, AU$235.35 million was spent on Linux servers, and in the same year, one in four servers shipped in the Australian market was Linux-based. Approximately 29 percent of all the money spent on server infrastructure in Australia went towards Linux servers.
Based on those figures, IDC believes Linux is now running more enterprise mission and business critical workloads than other OSes such as Windows Server.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Canonical launches Ubuntu Touch for tablets. Steam has been officially released for Linux. LG has bought WebOS for its televisions. Tizen SDK 2.0 has been released and Mozilla says there’s plenty of interest in its Firefox OS. Hear our discoveries and the interim results of our challenge, plus your own opinions in our internet famous Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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Last week when benchmarking the new F2FS file-system from Samsung that was introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel its performance was compared to Btrfs, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS. For those hoping to see file-system performance results of NILFS2, those results are available today.
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The EXT4 file-system in the forthcoming Linux 3.9 kernel will support using the previously-introduced punch hole functionality for inodes not using extent maps.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The two games worthy mentioning that were pushed out to the public for Steam Linux users are Counter Strike: Condition Zero and Wargame: European Escalation. There were also some other new titles pushed, but these are the two noteworthy additions. The full list of Linux titles can be found via the Steam Store.
Counter Strike: Condition Zero is a multi-player follow-up to the original Counter-Strike game. Condition Zero also features a single-player mission and bots. The game has been available to Windows gamers since 2004, but now nearly a decade later it’s been pushed to Linux. This is a native Linux port of another Valve “GoldSrc” engine game after Counter-Strike 1.6 and the original Half-Life.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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A few weeks ago we released a brand new major version of Kolab. The feedback we received was overwhelming and we are truly happy that we see more and more people who are taking control of the cloud and escape the monopoly with Kolab 3. It is great to have such an amazing community that encourages and supports our work while providing helpful and constructive feedback to make Kolab even more awesome.
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When Google Chrome first came out sporting its process separation feature where each tab is in its own process, it was broadly hailed as the best thing ever. The idea was to increase stability and security.
This was during a time when Plasma Desktop was still facing a number of implementation hurdles that impacted stability. So a number of well-meaning people decided that I should be informed about this revolutionary new idea in Chrome and every component in Plasma Desktop should be put into its own process.
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The second episode of KDE from the future, where we briefly talk about what happened this week in the development of Plasma and KWin is online here
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Can I thank all the Kubuntu Ninjas for their superlative efforts with Raring (amazingly stable for Alpha 2), KDE SC 4.10 and KDE Telepathy.. it is amazingly smooth and stable, and uses a lot less memory than previous releases.. very impressed..
I was watching a film about the Pirate Bay last night on BBC’s Storyville, turns out the people who run The Pirate Bay run KDE.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last month OpenMandriva announced a contest to solicit community contributed logo proposals. The entry deadline has come and gone and the next phase has begun. Once verification is complete, public voting commences. So, let’s take a look at some of the proposals.
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Gentoo Family
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The name “Sabayon” always rings me of a very refined and extremely polished Linux operating system. As has been my experience with Sabayon 9 and 10, even the Sabayon 11 release doesn’t disappoint. Sabayon 11 is refinement exemplified and is released in four flavors: Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE and LXDE. I start this series of review with my preferred desktop environment, XFCE.
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To begin with, Sabayon 11 release is not be missed. At least that is the evidence I got post using the Sabayon 11 XFCE release. Hardware support is better than ever with complete EFI/UEFI and UEFI SecureBoot support, greatly improved NVIDIA Optimus support through Bumblebee, a selection of MySQL flavors, including Google MySQL and MariaDB, up to 14000 packages now available in the repositories per architecture, and much, much more. I already reviewed the XFCE release and found it to be really really good. Next in line is the KDE version.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 arrives this month as a small but beautifully formed “minor” release with several new components including scale-out data access through parallel NFS (pNFS). To provide this, Red Hat has collaborated with its partners and the upstream community on the parallel Network File System (pNFS) industry standard.
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 27th February 2013: Big data holds big opportunities for companies here in the Middle East. Correctly leveraged, it can enable the organization to attract and retain new customers, deliver more innovative and profitable products, improve business performance and tap unexpected revenue streams. Oil companies are using real-time data to better manage remote drilling operations. E-commerce websites are using data from their operations to personalize the shopping experience and radically improve customer support. And an ever-growing number of start-up companies are combining innovative cloud services with big data analysis to create highly targeted products and services sold directly to consumers.
Yet harnessing the power of big data is not without challenges. The same massive volumes of structured and unstructured data that create these opportunities for innovation can confound attempts to cost-effectively contain it, let alone extract value from it. And while the strategic questions surrounding big data are indeed difficult- What data do we actually need? How should we analyze and interpret it? What value will we eventually get from it? Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is the most basic: How will we store it?
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Red Hat is the 800-kg gorilla of the commercial Linux space. SUSE is about quarter of that in terms of revenue, yet is the second biggest of the three companies that vie for business attention in the burgeoning Linux market.
Last week, Red Hat announced its intention to get into the big data business; this week SUSE is trying to woo new businesses in Australia and keep its existing partners in the loop.
There could not be a bigger contrast in the approach the two companies take.
Red Hat’s presser was a webcast, with Ranga Rangachari, vice-president and general manager of the company’s storage business unit, making a presentation. I understood it to be a one-hour affair, but it ran for only 32 minutes.
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Debian Family
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Kademar is Debian-based Linux distribution, with KDE as the default desktop. The first beta of what would be Kademar 5 was released a few days ago. And this beta release is my introduction to this distribution.
As always, I’m always curious to find out what the installer looks like and if it supports the features that define a feature-complete graphical installation program for a modern Linux distribution.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The developer preview of the Linux-based OS was released for the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones and Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets last week.
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At the time of this article, Canonical’s efforts with Ubuntu have done wonders for gaining new adopters for Linux. Sadly however, Canonical’s efforts have yet to make the company profitable.
Despite their financial shortcomings thus far, Canonical is bullish about their efforts with the Ubuntu phone and the Ubuntu tablet. Recently I was given the opportunity to try both firsthand.
After spending some time getting to know the interface and understanding the core back-end, I was shocked to find that in many regards the Ubuntu developer preview had a ton going for it. In this article, I will share why I think this could be a winning alternative to Android on the tablet.
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Canonical has been hard at work on some very interesting projects lately. This new direction started last year when it announced Ubuntu for phones, a fully featured desktop loaded onto an Android device. More recently — and more mysteriously — they’ve been working on the Ubuntu operating system for phones and tablets as a replacement for Android.
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Ubuntu 13.04 (codenamed Raring Ringtail), apart from being a long-term release, will bring along some major changes to the Ubuntu operating system. With the proposed improvements in Dash, one of Shuttleworth’s major goals, that is bringing the web and the desktop together, will get a shot in the arm. Undoubtedly, Ubuntu 13.04 marks a crucial release for Canonical.
Their new project on the other hand, which is bringing Ubuntu to smartphones, is in heavy development. But the busy developers at Canonical are making sure that their core product gets all the attention it deserves. Ubuntu 13.04, apart from bringing new features to the user, will also come with a more polished and refined look that will hopefully put it head-to-head with Microsoft’s convoluted Windows 8 desktop.
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While Ubuntu’s upcoming phone and tablet dominate the headlines, an existing controversy is threatening to flare up again as the 13.04 release nears. The display of Amazon search results in the dash, which first became an issue in the 12.10 release, is erupting again as Ubuntu plans to extend the feature to dozens of other websites. The company also plans to add direct payments from the dash and more suggestions.
Ubuntu has been displaying music search results in the dash for several releases. However, the music results were drawn from Ubuntu’s own music store, and those who use the dash to search for applications on their hard drive may have never noticed them.
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Some of you may have seen the news about us transitioning to an online Ubuntu Developer Summit and running the event every three months. If you didn’t see the news, you can read it here. I just wanted to share my personal perspective on this change.
For a long time now I have been attending Ubuntu Developer Summits as part of my work, but for the last event in Copenhagen my wife was about to give birth and so I attended the event remotely. As someone who has been heavily involved in the planning and execution of UDS for the last 10 or so events, I was intimately aware of the remote participation features of the event, but I had never actually utilized them myself. I was excited to dive into the sessions remotely and participate.
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The six-monthly Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS) – held in locations such as Brussels, Orlando in Florida, Budapest, Oakland in California, and Copenhagen – will not be taking place in future, according to an announcement by Community Manager Jono Bacon. The meetings will be replaced by online events held every three months. The real world events which saw Ubuntu and Canonical developers from around the world gather at the start of an Ubuntu release cycle to plan the features of that release, are to be replaced by online gatherings using Google+ Hangouts supported by IRC, Etherpad, “Social Media sharing and links to blueprints and specs”.
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s not easy to shell out $1,450 for a laptop that runs a Web-dependent operating system, especially when it has much, much cheaper counterparts. Why spend that much money on the Chromebook Pixel when you can get an Acer C7 for $200, a Samsung Series 3 for $250, or an HP Pavilion Chromebook for $330? The Chromebook Pixel does have great hardware replete with a display that can rival Apple’s Retina screen – and it does come with an amusing Konami easter egg – but the limitations brought about by Chrome OS might still deter most people from getting the device. Still, if it entices you enough that you actually want to get it, know that you can at least install Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it thanks to an extra BIOS slot.
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Ease of navigation, better battery performance, Fedora-style functionality; how can Linux users not find the fun in Fuduntu? This distro brings the open source goodness to the desktop, and provides workarounds for popular applications like Netflix, but does so in a way that’s almost an homage to classic Linux — right down to the old-school GNOME 2 desktop effects like woobly windows.
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When I first started preparing Bodhi ISO images almost two and a half years ago I set out with the goal of providing a clutter free operating system powered by the latest Enlightenment desktop. We call what we do “minimalist” meaning it doesn’t come with a whole lot by default. This ideology isn’t for everyone, though. Thankfully, the power of choice is something that greatly empowers free software development.
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Phones
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BARCELONA, Spain–The chief executives from Ubuntu, Firefox and Jolla argued that the wireless industry is desperately in need of additional smartphone choices, and that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Samsung’s dominance of the market needs to be broken.
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The head of Android praised the advent of Firefox OS, saying Mozilla’s effort can bring the Web to parts of the market that Android can’t reach.
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Ballnux
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Android
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Let’s start with my favorite topic, producing videos. As long as your need is only for production of short-form, nothing-fancy videos, the Nexus 7 can do it. Yes, it has only a front-facing camera. However, I was surprised to discover I had good results when I held it in the general direction of the action, without the aid of a screen to see what was captured. I used the app Camera ICS+, the plus being the pay-for $.99 version that captures 720p HD video from the Nexus 7. It also can be used for shooting high-quality still photos as well.
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ASUS has launched a 7-inch FonePad with built-in phone functionality at Mobile World Congress. You may have already heard about the tablet before its official launch but here are a few more details to share.
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Samsung Electronics Co. and Google Inc. together have stemmed Apple Inc.’s dominance in smartphones, but there is new tension in their partnership.
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As rumored 10 days ago, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is climbing back into the tablet business with an Android-based, consumer-targeted, mobile device the vendor will showcase today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The HP Slate 7, which runs Jelly Bean 4.1, features a 7-inch screen–the same size as Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle Fire–housed in a stainless steel frame measuring 10.7mm by 197mm by 116mm. It weighs 13 ounces and is powered by an ARM Dual Core Cortex-A9 1.6 GHz processor. The device comes with 8GB of storage. The unit’s display resolution is only 1024×600, although it features a wide viewing panel.
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In less than two months, April (2013) to be exact, you will be able to buy a Slate 7 Android tablet from HP for $169 USD.
Announced at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, the Slate 7 Android tablet is HP’s first consumer-level tablet device since the failed webOS-powered Touchpad.
But for that price, what will you be getting?
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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“The fact that we are open source is critical to most of our customers. The fact that it is absolutely transparent, that they can inspect the code if they want to, that they can pack up and move to self support is the ultimate alignment of our customers’ interest in our business model. And what they really care about more than anything else is that our business model must remain in radical alignment with theirs .”
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Free whitepaper – Cern and FuseSource Case Study
A group of Adelaide researchers has released an open-source tool that helps identify document authorship by comparing texts.
While their own test cases – and therefore the headlines – concentrated on identifying the authors of historical documents, it seems to The Register that any number of modern uses of such a tool might arise.
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No matter what technology exists, the wrong people seem to be in charge of turning the taps, argues Simon
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School budgets never seem to get any larger, but one way educational institutions may be able to cut costs is by deploying open source software. The open source community has developed applications that educators can use directly in the classroom, apps that are great for use at home and tools that administrators can use for school management.
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DoubleTwist, an iTunes alternative for the Android ecosystem, has teamed up with chipmaker Qualcomm on the release of “MagicPlay,” which the two companies are describing as an open-source, media-streaming platform meant to challenge Apple’s AirPlay. The technology is built on Qualcomm’s AllJoyn protocol, a mesh networking platform that has been in development for several years, but which has yet to achieve serious OEM or consumer adoption.
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Events
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The Southern California Linux Expo turned their annual event up to 11 this year in more ways than one.
SCALE 11X, celebrating its 11th year as the first-of-the-year Linux/Open Source expo in North America, played host to more than 2,300 attendees visiting more than 100 exhibitors and hearing more than 90 speakers giving a wide variety of presentations during the course of the three-day event.
Many of the sessions had full attendance, and some were in overflow status. A testament to the quality of the presentations during the course of SCALE 11X is that some of the final presentations on Sunday afternoon were also full.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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So, which is the best? Well, for my money, Chrome seems the easy best pick. Not only does it tend to be faster, usually far faster, than IE, it runs on almost every desktop platform you’re ever likely to use and it’s more HTML5 compatible. That said, if you’re running Windows 7and you must use IE, this latest Microsoft browser is a good choice.
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Mozilla
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After recently announcing the final version of Firefox 19, the Mozilla team is now focussing on the beta version of Firefox 20. The latest release of Firefox for Android Beta is ready for download and testing.
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We recently reported that the Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open are the first Firefox OS phones shipping this summer. You might think that there is not much to boast on the specs-front for these devices, but their availability does provide consumers with a different platform to choose from (especially with the likes of Android and iOS becoming pretty popular as well as common these days).
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In the wake of Mozila’s announcements regarding Firefox OS at Mobile World Congress, lots more details about its mobile operating system are emerging. Sony has joined several other hardware makers and said that it intends to deliver Firefox OS phones in 2014. The initial telcos that will deliver phones and services for it are now known. LG Electronics, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch will all ship Firefox OS phones in the coming months. Chinese company Huawei is on board as well, and ZTE has a strong presence in China.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle no doubt got the bang for the big bucks it paid for MySQL via its Sun acquisition. But the original developers of MySQL won’t let it die and as developers and customers begin to defect to their increasingly popular MySQL Fork — MariaDB.
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LibreOffice can only exist since people are working on it: so please, tell us a bit about yourself.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I hear he was here last time in the mid-90ies, but that happened ages ago and very few people know it ever happened, so when Richard Stallman came to Bucharest it was quite an event for the local FOSS community, many traveled long distance to see him talking. For me it was obvious to go there, I never attended one of his talks and it was a perfect opportunity to take some photos.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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With the cost of forking reduced or eliminated entirely, software development is parellelized; much as bacteria evolve more quickly because they iterate in peer to peer fashion, so too can software projects innovate along multiple parallel tracks rather than a single serial development path. DVCS-enabled forking, then, is an enormous step forward for software development.
What is less clear, however, is the impact of forking on platform compatibility in an age of permissively licensed software. In his counterpoint to Schuller’s original blog post, VMware’s Patrick Chanezon pointed to this timeline of the various Linux forks, saying in part that there would be “No Linux of the Cloud without forking.” This assertion is likely correct; certainly it’s difficult to imagine Linux evolving as quickly or successfully without its decentralized – and fork-friendly – development model. As many are aware, in fact, Git – the most popular DVCS tool in use today – was originally written to manage the Linux kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.
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The Obama administration is right to direct federal agencies to make public, without charge, all scientific papers reporting on research financed by the government. In a memorandum issued on Friday, John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, directed federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures to develop plans for making the published results of almost all the research freely available to everyone within one year of publication.
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A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recent briefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.
Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”
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The White House responded last week to the petition: Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research. It was posted to the We the People petition site and got 65,704 signatures (the minimum required is 25,000).
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Programming
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Oracle has released version 7.3 of its NetBeans open source IDE; this is mainly used in Java development, but also works with PHP and C/C++. The new release’s features cater predominantly to the needs of programmers who increasingly need to include HTML5, JavaScript and CSS in their desktop and mobile applications. As a consequence, the majority of new features affect the web development and mobile capabilties of the IDE. The highlight of these enhancements is the new JavaScript editor and debugger that is based on the Nashorn project; Nashorn is the new JavaScript implementation for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).
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Microsoft had the embarrassment of seeing its Azure flagship cloud storage system crash for 12 hours on Friday because it forgot to renew an SSL certificate. Before laughing yourself silly, are you sure that a similar disaster couldn’t happen to your internet presence?
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Health/Nutrition
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Japanese and American officials discussed taking action to weaken a prominent anti-whaling group, with Tokyo insisting that Sea Shepherd’s confrontations on the high seas actually hurt efforts to reduce whaling, U.S. diplomatic cables show.
The U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission, Monica Medina, discussed revoking the U.S.-based conservation group’s tax-exempt status during a meeting with senior officials from the Fisheries Agency of Japan in November 2009, according to the documents released by WikiLeaks on Monday.
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Security
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…Bank of America is paying contractors to discredit journalist and sabotage their work…
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The inventor who co-founded visual PIN company GrIDsure has become involved with another pattern-based authentication start-up in the hopes that the shoulder-surfer proof technology could replace two-factor authentication.
His new company, Brit firm’s PinPlus, does away with passwords and PINs by combining a method for securely delivering one-time codes to users, with an architecture for storing users’ login “secrets” on servers.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Just how many classified opinions has the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued since President Barack Obama took office four years ago? The department won’t say.
Back in December, before disclosure of a Justice Department “white paper” on the legal justification for targeted killings set off a drumbeat of calls for the Obama administration to provide Congress with all OLC memos on the drone strike program, this reporter asked the Office of Legal Counsel for a list of every opinion it had issued during the Obama years.
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I think my patience broke with the revelation that the Obama administration was more willing to give Butters some bullshit info on Benghazi than to give any ground on releasing the full, complete, original memos used to justify the assassination of Americans who have joined the Jihadist enemy. The cynicism was staggering. Those of us who supported Obama need to express our disgust and anger at this – especially those of us who have defended the drone program as, within key judicial and congressional constraints, sometimes the least worst option in keeping us safe.
This cannot be regarded as somehow a state secret. It divulges no plans; it just explains to American citizens the criteria by which their own president can kill them from the sky without any due process. If the torture memos could be released by this administration, as they were, so can these. And not just to some Congressional Committee – to all of us.
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Let’s hope that newly minted Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will live up to some of our expectations and not be afraid to tell it like it is. Let’s start with Afghanistan. We just found out today that an alleged data entry glitch in the Pentagon program that spits out regular assessments like the number of Taliban attacks on our forces prompted the Department of Defense to issue too-rosy proclamations on the progress of the war there.
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President Barack Obama’s administration is looking at easing the secrecy around the drone war against al-Qaida by shifting control for some air strikes from the CIA to the U.S. military, officials say.
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The nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director has prompted intense debate on Capitol Hill and in the media about U.S. drone killings abroad. But the focus has been on the targeting of American citizens – a narrow issue that accounts for a miniscule proportion of the hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen in recent years.
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Weeks after they were rebuffed by the Sept. 11 trial judge, civil liberties and media groups have appealed to the Pentagon’s Court of Military Commissions Review for more transparency at the Guantánamo war court.
At issue is whether the world can hear the accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators talk about what the CIA did to them during their years of secret custody before they got to Guantánamo. Government officials already have acknowledged that CIA agents waterboarded Mohammed 183 times.
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Kiriakou, who also served as a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says he feels “oddly optimistic” about his upcoming prison sentence and wears his “conviction as a badge of honor.”
“I believe my case was about torture, not about leaking. I’m right on the torture issue, the administration is wrong, and I’m just going to carry that with me,” he says.
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Its depiction of torture ruined its Oscars chances, but that’s the very reason this film will live on: Pop culture’s portrayals of military practices can shape real ones.
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The Air Force has some bad news for the pilots of its F-22 Raptor stealth fighters: Your planes are going to make you feel crappy and there’s not much anyone can do about it. And the message to the maintainers of the radar-evading jet is even more depressing. Any illness they feel from working around the Raptor is apparently all in their heads, according to the Air Force.
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“There have been a few tentative steps on accountability for crimes allegedly committed by Sri Lankan troops and civilian officials during the war with the LTTE. President Rajapaksa named a committee to make recommendations to him on the U.S. incidents report by April, and candidate Fonseka has discussed privately the formation of some form of ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission. Otherwise, accountability has not been a high-profile issue — including for Tamils in Sri Lanka. While Tamils have told us they would like to see some form of accountability, they have been pragmatic in what they can expect and have focused instead on securing greater rights and freedoms, resolving the IDP question, and improving economic prospects in the war-ravaged and former LTTE-occupied areas. Indeed, while they wanted to keep the issue alive for possible future action, Tamil politicians with whom we spoke in Colombo, Jaffna, and elsewhere said now was not time and that pushing hard on the issue would make them ‘vulnerable.’” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.
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Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has come under fire for paying almost a quarter of a million dollars to a neo-Nazi informer linked to a far-right terror group.
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The chairman of Dutch neo-nazi party Nederlandse Volks-Unie has been given 40 hours community service and a two-week suspended jail sentence for his role in an anti-foreigner demonstration in 2011.
The court in Almelo said Constant Kusters and three others were guilty of insulting foreigners and discrimination at the rally in the southern city of Enschede.
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HoRa (People-against-Racism) warns: nationalist and neo-Nazi tendencies made provocations during today’s (Feb. 24, 2013) procession, which started officially from the Ministry of Economics in protest of high electricity bills.
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Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, confirmed at the weekend it had halted public subsidies to the neo-Nazi party NPD over an unpaid fine.
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Cablegate
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Sensitive witnesses to testify behind closed doors about harm to US from WikiLeaks as Manning denied right to present evidence
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Decision to post 84 documents provides first crack in the army’s public information blackout during WikiLeaks trial
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The thrilling development in the trial of Bradley Manning is that Manning has acknowledged he is the source of the leaked materials, but employed a whistleblower defence. His case is that he was exposing illegal acts and trying to arouse legitimate public debate. However in the kangaroo court trial the prosecution has objected to Manning’s proposed evidence, and claims that Manning’s detailed references to specific war crimes are irrelevant and should not be allowed to be made in court. In other words, the state is seeking to prevent Bradley Manning from presenting his defence, and doubtless the military “judge” will comply with the state.
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One of the signature traits of LGBT subculture in the United States is its adoration of celebrity. If a well-known person voices the most milk-toast notion that gays are human beings, let alone deserving of legal equality, banner headlines in the gay press are guaranteed. If the celebrity comes out as gay, even more effusive coverage is given.
Any number of fading stars and starlets, and non-entities on the make, from Lady Gaga to Chaz Bono to Ricky Martin, have mined the LGBT community to support their careers. Our community’s eager rush to embrace just about any celebrity who deigns to notice our existence is emblematic of our lack of self-esteem, our internalized homophobia.
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Australian diplomats in Washington have continued to report to Canberra about an “ongoing criminal investigation” by United States authorities into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
However US Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich and Foreign Minister Bob Carr last night dismissed any suggestions the US may wish to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher as ludicrous” and “sheer fantasy”.
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Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier who the United States military is prosecuting for providing classified information to WikiLeaks, will read from or refer to a typed thirty-five page statement on February 28 when he gives his proposed plea. The statement will include his understanding of why he is guilty of committing elements of the original charges or lesser-included offenses, along with why he decided to provide information to WikiLeaks.
David Coombs, Manning’s defense lawyer, said during proceedings at the military court at Fort Meade that Manning himself had typed it up and signed it. He said the court agreed to allow Manning to read the statement aloud.
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The US government is believed to be preparing to put a Navy Seal on the witness stand to testify that secret files published by WikiLeaks were discovered in Osama bin Laden’s compound.
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People shouldn’t fear their government; government should fear its people. Publishers and journalists will not be intimidated nor silenced. Now entering day 626 of the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, Julian Assange sits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London awaiting safe passage.
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Finance
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The West Virginia auditor found that the State Office of Technology used a purchasing process which is unauthorized by West Virginia statute or legislative rule to purchase the Cisco 3945 routers under the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) grant. The Office of Technology used a “Secondary Bid Process” on an existing contract approved by the State Purchasing Division, instead of a competitive bid process open to non-Cisco vendors, as required by law.
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But does that folklore about French workers hold up? No. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (1/28/11) recently noted that worker productivity is basically the same as the United States. What’s different? The French work fewer hours, likely because they have more vacation time.
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To those who would argue that the notion of a perpetual motion machine is impossible, we give you the revolving door — that ever-spinning entrance and exit between public service in government and the hugely profitable private sector. It never stops.
Yes, we’ve talked about the revolving door until we’re red or blue in the face (the door is bipartisan and spins across party lines) but this mantra bears its own perpetual repetition, a powerful reason for our distrust of the people who make and enforce our laws and regulations.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Guardian columnist and blogger Glenn Greenwald joined HuffPost Live Tuesday and railed against what he called “reckless and irresponsible” journalism by BuzzFeed reporter Tessa Stuart.
Stuart wrote a story Monday claiming that Michael Moore had overhyped the recent detention of Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat at LAX as an attempt to seek publicity for Burnat’s Oscar-nominated documentary, “5 Broken Cameras.” Her story was based on a single government source, and she was forced to issue a correction after initially presenting it as based on multiple sources.
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One year ago today, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman. On average, 30 people are killed by firearms each day, so Trayvon Martin could have become just another faceless statistic. But the tragedy soon gained national attention as a result of the injustice wrought by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which was cited to protect Zimmerman from prosecution because he claimed to have felt threatened by the unarmed African-American teenager.
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Speaking of which: How many civilians died in the U.S.-led war in Iraq? CBS Evening News told viewers in December of 2011 that it was 50,000. It wasn’t until FAIR activists pointed out that this was woefully incomplete–as was even acknowledged by the source of that 50,000 figure–that the broadcast did an update, now telling viewers that over twice as many Iraqi civilians were killed.
But those Iranians and their clunky Photoshop skills, right?
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Standing with co-producers, including George Clooney, director Ben Affleck accepted the Academy Award for a quirky film that stands as a humanist rejection of what has dominated Hollywood of late. How many films open, like Argo, with a voiced historical vignette admitting to a moment of American infamy in the Middle East? The U.S.-engineered 1953 coup in Iran began the Shah’s reign and set the country into a vortex of repression and violence, chaos that would ultimately result in American hostages.
Grounded in this context, Argo tells the story of a nonviolent rescue mission driven by a fantastical science-fiction film fantasy, instead of a mission that fills movie screens with Black Hawk helicopters and post-9/11 tropes that dictate mass murder of stereotyped enemies who so richly deserve to die.
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Still, he concludes by agreeing with the conservative reader. Without citing any examples of what he considers to be unfair treatment of opponents of marriage equality, Pexton writes: “The Post should do a better job of understanding and conveying to readers, with detachment and objectivity, the beliefs and the fears of social conservatives.”
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In Ontario, 465 union workers used to make locomotive engines. Then Indiana passed ALEC’s anti-union legislation, and Caterpillar moved the works to Muncie. And that’s bad for everybody.
It’s an anniversary London, Ontario, did not celebrate. It’s been a year, and the shock has yet to wear off in the Canadian city just an hour’s drive east of Detroit. All that remains is the hardship of carrying on through mass joblessness, and its hand-in-hand partners, surges in poverty, mental health crises and addiction.
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Officials were angered further on Sunday night when the US First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Best Movie gong via live video link from the White House.
The film, which recounts the 1979-81 US hostage crisis in Tehran, was denounced as “an advertisement for the CIA” by state TV.
Iran’s culture minister Mohammad Hosseini said Hollywood had “distorted history” as part of a “soft war” of cultural influence against his country.
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Iran’s state television has dismissed the Oscar-winning film “Argo” as an “advertisement for the CIA” and the semiofficial Mehr news agency called the Oscar “politically motivated” because First Lady Michelle Obama helped to present the best picture prize.
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That quiet punctuation mark ended a noisy past few months, during which committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, along with Senate colleagues John McCain and Carl Levin, loudly criticized the film, which dramatizes the 10-year hunt for and assassination of Osama bin Laden. In December, the three senators called “Zero Dark Thirty” “grossly misleading and inaccurate,” accused screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow of suggesting that torture led directly to Bin Laden and called on Sony Pictures Entertainment to add a disclaimer to the film emphasizing that torture played no role in the hunt.
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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that she sees “no need to request further information” from the CIA on the assistance it gave to the makers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and denied that the Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry was an investigation of the film itself.
Screenwriter Mark Boal has been particularly critical of the Senate inquiry, saying that it raises questions of free speech and whether it will put a “chill” on future projects if movies are put under the microscope on how their creators gathered facts. He also said that he may be subpoenaed to testify.
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Censorship
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Charges in WikiLeaks case will not be dismissed as judge rules soldier’s right to a speedy trial has not been violated
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The Australian Federal Police has sought to prevent the public from ascertaining the identities of ISPs participating in the Federal Government’s voluntary filter scheme for child abuse materials, through redacting the ISPs’ details from relevant documents released under Freedom of Information laws.
In November last year, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy formally dumped the Government’s highly controversial mandatory Internet filtering scheme, instead throwing his support behind a much more limited scheme which sees Australian ISPs voluntarily implementing a much more limited filter which Telstra, Optus and one or two other ISPs had already implemented. Vodafone is also believed to be implementing the filter, and the process is also believed to be under way at other ISPs such as iiNet.
The ‘voluntary’ filter only blocks a set of sites which international policing agency Interpol has verified contain “worst of the worst” child pornography — not the wider Refused Classification category of content which Conroy’s original filter had dealt with. The instrument through which the ISPs are blocking the Interpol list of sites is Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act. Under the Act, the Australian Federal Police is allowed to issue notices to telcos asking for reasonable assistance in upholding the law. It is believed the AFP has issued such notices to Telstra and Optus to ask them to filter the Interpol blacklist of sites.
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Privacy
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You may think of your iPhone as a friendly personal assistant. But once it’s alone in a room full of law enforcement officials, you might be surprised at the revealing things it will say about you.
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Since 2005, the nonprofit data privacy group Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has counted more than 3,000 separate incidents resulting in the exposure of more than 600 million records containing Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or credit card numbers.
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According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady’s new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have grown, since 9/11.
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…version of Android developed by the National Security Agency
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Civil Rights
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Court’s conservatives say there’s no evidence plaintiffs, including Amnesty International, were harmed by controversial law allowing wholesale surveillance of international communications.
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In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled today that clients of the American Civil Liberties Union lack standing to challenge a broad surveillance law enacted by Congress in 2008 because they cannot prove that surveillance of their communications is “certainly impending.” The lawsuit challenged the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international emails and phone calls without identifying its targets to any court.
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The five right-wing justices hand Obama a victory by accepting his DOJ’s secrecy-based demand for dismissal
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This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but the Supreme Court has completely shot down the ACLU (and some activists and journalists’) attempt to invalidate the part of the FISA Amendments Act that “legalized” warrantless wiretapping. As we guessed at the time of the oral hearings, it seemed like it was going to be difficult to convince a majority of the court that the plaintiffs had any standing to complain, since they couldn’t show that they had been directly impacted. And, indeed the court ruled 5 to 4 that there was no standing here. So, basically, there is simply no way to challenge the constitutionality of warrantless wiretaps.
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Legislation advances in three states aimed at protecting citizens from indefinite detention as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012
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1. Obama Says Goodbye to Freedom and Democracy In the NDAA Bill (Areej Elahi-Siddiqui, @andareejsays) – The NDAA bill is riddled with abstract and ambiguous terms making it easy to detain just about anyone.
[18 Mics, 14 Comments, 121 Shares]
2. Organizing For Action Sends President Down a Dark Path (Sal Bommarito, @SalBommarito) – The goal of the new OFA group is to support Obama’s second-term policies, including curbing gun control and overhauling immigration. There is no precedent for this presidential lobbying power.
[16 Mics, 47 Comments, 65 Shares]
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Copyrights
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It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) is finally launching. CAS is an agreement between Big Content and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer to peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe—via everything from from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds.
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Hadopi, the French “three strikes” administration, released yesterday a report [fr] on the fight against streaming and direct download sites. It advocates for the establishment of measures bearing a close resemblance to those of ACTA and the US SOPA bill, both shelved following a strong citizen mobilization for the defense of fundamental freedoms. Currently confined to the fight against file sharing between individuals, Hadopi now wants to extend its control to Internet intermediaries such as hosting services, search engines, Internet service providers or online payment services. Doing so, could only lead them to actively monitor content shared on the Net, with unavoidable collateral damage to freedom of expression, the protection of privacy and the right to a fair trial.
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This week marks the rollout of the long delayed “Copyright Alert System” aka the six strike anti-piracy program. It’s a bit confusing at a glance, but it’s not nearly as powerful as you’d think. Here’s how the system works, how it’ll affect you, and everything else you need to know.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 1:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Some of Microsoft’s latest technical attacks on Linux and some responses to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) tactics and FUD
Torvalds clearly refuses to give up by putting blobs and keys (similar to but worse than firmware) by adding Microsoft interfaces for Microsoft-signed keys inside the kernel, especially if these are Microsoft’s. This is major news that got the attention of journalists and a known Microsoft booster incites against Torvalds over this (just see headline and image here). Red Hat has been getting close to Microsoft again, so as one blogger put it:
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It’s great that Linus does not support the idea of making M$ the keeper of the keys. We’ve had enough of that in IT for decades. Free Software needs to remain free of M$ and anyone else who wishes to lock out competition. Linus is not a great lover of FLOSS. His views are based on practicality. It’s stupid to lock Linux into M$. Does RedHat really believe it’s a great thing if millions of GNU/Linux boxes quit booting if M$ revokes a key via firmware upgrade etc.? Do they really think “secure boot” is about security of the world’s IT rather than perpetuation of M$’s monopoly on legacy x86 stuff? Using the damned keys to induce the world to take another step on the Wintel treadmill is just too tempting a fruit to trust M$ to leave it alone.
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I don’t think so. In the immortal words of Paul Maritz, “* to combat Nscp. we have to have position the browser as “going away” and do deeper integration on Windows. The stronger way to communicate this is to have a “new release“ of windows and make a big deal out of it. We will thus position Memphis as “Windows 98′. * IE integration will be most compelling feature of Memphis.“ Nathan Myhrvold wrote, “I think that it is CRUCIAL to make the statement we ask people about in the survey, or the statement we ask them to sign etc. is worded properly. Saying “put the browser in the OS” is already a statement that is prejudical to us. The name “Browser” suggests a separate thing. I would NOT phrase the survey. or other things only in terms of “put the browser in the 0S’‘. Instead you need to ask a more neutral question about how Internet technology needs to merge with local computing. I have been pretty successful in trying this on various joumalists and industry people.“ To sum up, is the company that brought waves of malware to the world of IT by integrating a totally insecure web browser with their OS in order to mess with competitors to be trusted as “open”? No. M$ is a closed corporation with closed products intending to close out competition by fair means or foul. Pretending to be open is just a means to delay the shift to real openness, FLOSS, or to slow that shift.
Even more Microsoft-apologetic circles accepted Torvalds’ skepticism. To quote one:
As it turned out, almost all of the Windows 8 machines that first appeared had Secure Boot implemented in such a way that Linux was locked out. Workarounds have appeared, but they are based on Microsoft-signed keys. As the maker of the dominant Windows operating system, Microsoft has a responsibility to protect fair play in a way that it didn’t here. In this day of virtualization and usage of multiple operating systems, it’s unfair to build an operating system around a methodology that allows for complete and utter lockout of other platforms. Torvalds’ reactions are only protests at the end of the chain reaction that all of this represented. The fact is that if Microsoft wants to be accepted as playing more fairly with open source these days than it ever has, it has carry that concept through to how it deals with everything it builds and how it deals with hardware makers.
Microsoft pretends to be open, but it’s not working. Here is another new embrace-and-extend attempt:
The expanded partnership between Microsoft and Hadoop distribution specialist Hortonworks has borne fruit with the release of a beta of Hortonworks’ Hadoop Data Platform for Windows.
With its hidden patches and a deal with Sourcefire Microsoft must have hoped to diss Linux some more. Watch this nonsense:
But simple vulnerability counts can give a distorted view. The Linux kernel is considered to be one monolithic project across the entire period, for example, while every version of Windows is a separate project. The total count of vulnerabilities for all Windows versions exceeds Linux. But then Windows is more than just a kernel. Add in all the software included in Linux distributions, and Linux goes back into the doghouse. Younan counted just the high-severity vulnerabilities, those with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7 or higher. Windows XP tops that list. “Windows Vista is at the number five position, even though Microsoft put a lot of effort into securing Windows Vista,” he said. “The Linux kernel isn’t even in the top ten.” Vista was the first version of Windows to benefit from Microsoft’s Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), the software development process created after Bill Gates’ Trustworthy Computing memo of January 2002. Yet from the vulnerability perspective, Vista looks like little more than a rough draft of Windows 7. Counting high-severity vulnerabilities alone, Flash Player is back in the top 10, at number five. The count of high-severity vulnerabilities doesn’t exhibit that 2012 uptick, only the steady post-2006 decline. However when looking at just critical vulnerabilities, those with a CVSS of 10, there’s no sign of a decline at all.
What silly way to count vulnerabilities. As one of the many comments points out: “I largely agree with Alex in Comment 3 (I also agree with Myth in Comment 1 that 22 != 25, but I digress). Without knowing which kernels had which CVEs reported against it, and which distros shipped with those kernels and how many people used the vulnerable kernel and the averages of people updating on install… ‘simply’ citing the Linux CVEs are practically meaningless.” The FUD against Linux recently seems like part of a trend this month, with Microsoft partners behind it. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 1:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News about Vista 8 and the flagship Vista 8 hardware
It is no secret that Microsoft is having many problems these days. Vista 8, the common carrier, is not being adopted in commerce. This is a big deal. People also ditch it after paying for it:
The world is “clearing” “8″. Is there any better proof that M$’s house is crumbling? Clearing is what retailers do when they want to make room for other stock or they are tired of stuff filling shelves without selling. They will throw away most if not all of their profit in doing so. One of M$’s cash-cows is drying up.
Even Microsoft allies like Gartner have no faith in Vista 8 and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks that Microsoft loses its identity:
If, however, Microsoft makes Office available for those more popular tablets as well, Surface will never catch up. Microsoft must know that it’s looking at the possibility of Surface joining the ranks of Zune.
So that’s the billion-dollar question Microsoft is facing. Does it put all its eggs in the software basket, as it has done for the most part during all its existence, or does it continue to seek a foothold as a hardware vendor? If Office for iOS and Android does come along, it has decided to forgo its dreams of hardware riches.
As Hamlet might sum it all up: Thus sales do make cowards of us all; and enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard their marketing turns awry, and lose the name of action.
This is a massive crisis. Windows has become irrelevant. At electronics stores, for instance, Android seems to be outselling Windows. I last saw that yesterday. Even Apple is growing at Microsoft’s expense. █
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02.26.13
Posted in News Roundup at 10:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The job market for Linux professionals this year is even better than it was in 2012. Ninety-three percent of hiring managers surveyed said they plan to hire at least one Linux pro in the next six months — up from 89 percent last year, according to the 2013 Linux Jobs Report released last week by Dice and The Linux Foundation. And 75 percent of Linux pros surveyed say at least one recruiter has called them in the last six months in an effort to find talent for positions that are getting harder to fill.
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Bill Richardson, a software engineer for Google, has detailed how to boot a conventional Linux distribution on the company’s new Chromebook Pixel. Google released the Chromebook Pixel last week – the device costs £1,049, has a 13″ touchscreen with a resolution of 2560×1700 pixels, a 1.8GHz Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and 32GB (64GB for the LTE version) of internal SSD storage. Where previous Chromebooks only supported booting Google’s ChromeOS directly, the Pixel has an added option to support a third-party bootloader which enables it to be relatively easily modified to boot stock Linux desktop distributions.
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The Linux Foundation has surveyed 850 hiring managers at small and medium businesses, larger corporations, government organisations and recruiting agencies, as well as 2,600 Linux professionals worldwide, about the state of the Linux job market for its 2013 Linux Jobs Report. The report was created in conjunction with the Dice.com career web site and concludes that 93% of the surveyed companies are planning to hire at least one Linux professional in the next six months and 90% said it was difficult to find people with the appropriate skill sets for these jobs.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Takashi Iwai has mailed in the sound updates for the Linux 3.9 kernel. This Git pull has the much anticipated HDA Intel audio re-work.
The biggest highlight of the sound updates for Linux 3.9 is the unification of the HD Audio codec driver so that there’s now a generic parser that is used by each HDA codec driver. This big fundamental audio change is covered in more detail in the earlier Phoronix article.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the GNU R programming language. It starts a series of articles devoted to programming with R. Its objective is to present, in an organized and concise manner, the elementary components of the R programming language. It is designed to help you understand R code and write your own. It is assumed that the reader has already some basic programming knowledge of R. If you are not familiar with any of R features it is recommended that you first read A quick GNU R tutorial to basic operations, functions and data structures.
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Games
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Nuclear Pizza War by Team Mojang has a Linux build and is open source as well, I doubt it will be long before it gets on github and picks up new contributors. No news on it’s license yet so I won’t be linking to the sources until it’s license gets explained, hopefully another “do what you want” license like they did with their game on the first bundle.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE and Plasma developer Aaron Seigo has given an update on the state of the planned Vivaldi tablet in a video published on his YouTube channel. In the video, Seigo addresses new developments regarding the tablet, which was originally announced at the beginning of 2012. The team has apparently changed its plans and has designed its own, custom tablet hardware which should enter general production in about three months. According to Seigo, the manufacturer has now begun the tooling for the hardware. The last official statement on the project dates from September and cites a major setback.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Projects announced a couple of days ago the first Beta version of the GNOME Settings Daemon 3.8 package for the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Arch Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. on Wednesday announced the contribution of its Hadoop plug-in to the Apache open source community.
Best known for its enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat announced the open sourcing of its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in as part of a broader announcement of a shift in direction toward embracing Big Data with an “open hybrid cloud” application platform and infrastructure.
As explained by company executive Ranga Rangachari in a Webcast, the open hybrid cloud is designed to give companies the ability to create Big Data workloads on a public cloud and move them back and forth between their own private clouds, “without having to reprogram those applications.” Red Hat said in a news release that many companies use public clouds such as Amazon Web Services for developing software, proving concepts and pre-production phases of projects that use Big Data. “Workloads are then moved to their private clouds to scale up the analytics with the larger data set,” the company said.
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In addition to its focus on cloud computing, which will be led by an OpenStack-based distribution and robust support plans taking shape this year, Red Hat is also doublling down on its focus on Big Data. The company has announced that it “will contribute its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the ApacheTM Hadoop open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments.” The goal is to be able to help companies put in place Big Data-crunching environments that work in conjunction with cutting-edge storage strategies.
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Fedora
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For me, Fedora 18 Spherical Cow was a big disappointment, mostly because Fedora 17 was a big positive surprise. It’s like that woman who keeps smiling at you through the dinner and flirts with you, and then when you take her into your motel room, she suddenly starts crying. I mean what’s up with that.
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It’s no secret that the new Anaconda installer for Fedora 18 has caused a stir. As part of a major internal re-write, the user interface has been completely re-designed which has caused some confusion and there are bugs and missing features. This is why we included an install video in Korora 18, to help walk you through the process.
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At our school we have around 100 desktops, a vast majority of which run Fedora, and somewhere around 900 users. We switched from Windows to Fedora shortly after Fedora 8 was released and we’ve hit 8, 10, 13, 16, and 17 (deploying a local koji instance has made it easier to upgrade).
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical took the entire IT world by storm with the back-to-back announcements of Ubuntu Phone and then Tablet OS. It’s looks really impressive in the video (since most of it is in developer preview stage and non working, we can’t comment how it will shape up). It was really impressive to see how Canonical managed to do develop Ubuntu Touch from ‘ground-up’.
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There’s a Key Lime Pie-size hole in the Android ecosystem, and Jelly Bean hasn’t filled the gap. Jelly Bean has suited me well for the past five months, but that doesn’t mean I’m not getting bored with it. I’m looking for more quick settings in the notification pull-down bar, an overhaul to the app drawer to add more icons per page, and a maximum CPU-clock speed to negate Project Butter’s battery drain effect.
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After Mark Shuttleworth kindly demonstrated Ubuntu Mobile for us at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, we’ve all been patiently wondering how different — or similar for that matter — it would look on a tablet. Wonder no longer with this here preview video!
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Flavours and Variants
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David Tavares, the developer of the Pear OS Linux operating system, announced a few hours ago that he released the first Alpha version of the upcoming Pear OS 7 Server distribution.
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Wind River®, a world leader in embedded and mobile software, has joined the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL). With its membership, Wind River will collaborate with other OSADL members to further promote and support Linux solutions for the embedded and industrial markets.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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China-based Konka is all set to enter India with a range of Android smartphones. The company, in association with Mak Mobility, is planning to launch Android-powered Expose phone in India. The company said with Expose, it aims to target both photography enthusiasts and discerning smartphone users.
After launching Expose in the Indian market, the company has plans to come up with a few more handsets including ‘Tuxedo’ for business executives and Tango smartphones for music lovers.
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Long after giving up on TouchPads and other mobile devices, HP has made a tablet comeback with the announcement of its first Android device, the HP Slate 7. With a starting price of $169, it is likely to be launched in the United States in April this year.
Talking about the specs, the Slate 7 is a 7-inch tablet that runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS. With a soft-touch rubber exterior, the device sports a dual-core 1.6GHz ARM Cortex-A9 chip, 1024 x 600 resolution FFS+ LCD touchscreen display, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of solid state storage (expandable via microSD), 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.1. It has a front-facing VGA webcam and a 3-megapixel rear camera. The speakers have Beats Audio processing with a stainless steel frame.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Hewlett-Packard has reentered the consumer tablet market with the Slate 7, an Android-based device with a 7-inch screen that will start at US$169.
The Slate 7 will run Android 4.1, also known as Jellybean, and have a dual-core processor based on ARM’s Cortex-A9 design. It will start shipping in the U.S. in April, HP said. It didn’t provide availability details for other countries.
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“On the one hand, a real Linux tablet is very attractive,” said Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “On the other hand, what will the ecosystem look like? Will there be all of the apps I want? … There is a tendency still for companies to not create Linux clients for popular apps. So will there be Kindle app for Ubuntu? An Evernote app? What about all of the Google apps?”
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Sony’s Xperia Tablet Z is getting some second looks, with its slim-line design and trove of advanced features — not to mention its ability to take a bathtub dunking in stride. It’s a full-size tablet at 10.1 inches, but it’s only a quarter inch thick and weighs just over a pound. It’s also PlayStation certified.
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Samsung has turned Android into the leading player in the smartphone segment pushing Apple to the second position. The company is far ahead of the other Android players who have failed to mark any significant presence in the market, whether it be LG, Sony or HTC. This huge gap between Samsung and the rest of the Android players has started to worry Google, the company which created Android.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The not-for-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser has announced handsets based on its operating system for mobile phones.
In a press conference ahead of Mobile World Congress, Mozilla said that 18 operators including Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica, were signed up.
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Firefox is giving people concerned about their online privacy another reason to like the popular browser.
It will begin blocking cookies from third-party advertisers in an upcoming release. While Firefox users can already use the Do Not Track extension to stave them off, the patch will allow the browser to do it by default. That means sites you’ve visited can leave cookies on your computer but ad networks that don’t already have one on your machine can’t.
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In the World Wide Web, the latest in technology and knowledge base production begets the latest in browsers. And with innovations seemingly limitless, there is no reason why browser development—literally our window into the web—should lag behind.
With this logic to stay up-to-date and even take the lead probably in mind, Mozilla introduces Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. This latest and most up-to-date Firefox version features a cross-platform built-in PDF viewer within the latest Firefox browser. This improvement offers a safer and more seamless PDF viewing experience on any desktop and theme support on Google’s Android mobile platform.
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Jumping into bed with Apple was a mistake for the mobile operators. Firefox is their second attempt at a solution.
Apple was a mistake because operators gave away all their apps revenue to Cupertino, and that cash would have come in handy as voice and SMS cashflow declined. Instead, Apple was allowed to break all the rules – side loading, its own ecosystem, a share of revenues and many more.
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Unlocking the power of the Web on mobile, Mozilla on Sunday announced the first phones powered by its HTML5-focused Firefox mobile operating system (OS) at the Mobile World Congress. The Alcatel One Touch Fire and the ZTE Open are the first Firefox OS phones which, Mozilla said, are coming this summer. These two phones will come with Nokia’s Here Maps application preloaded, along with deep Facebook integration.
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In conjunction with the Mobile World Congress conference, Mozila has officially taken the wraps off of its plans for Firefox OS, the mobile operating system that could represent the future of the company. Firefox OS is a free operating system that puts open web standards first, and the initial telcos that will deliver phones and services for it are known. LG Electronics, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch will all ship Firefox OS phones in the coming months. Chinese company Huawei is on board as well, and ZTE has a strong presence in China. Several analysts have already noted that Firefox OS has more support from hardware makers than Android had early on.
Sometimes people forget how very young Android is. It was only back in 2009 that we were wondering why HTC was the only committed hardware backer of Android. Fast-forward to today, and Android leads the mobile phone market. Can the same happen to Firefox OS?
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Firefox will now automatically block all third-party cookies, a crucial tool to help advertisers track users, and the ad industry is not happy about it.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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We had an amazing success with the release of LibreOffice 4.0. New website pages, a flurry of articles (Time Magazine, ZDNet, TechCrunch Ars Technica, Computerworld, Slashdot, just to name a few), and a generally good feedback. We’re collecting as much data as we can to see how far we went in terms of downloads, but empirically we can already say that it was a success. The infra team worked hard to handle a huge load of visits and downloads; a major “Tweetstorm” that lasted for about 9 hours, and web trends that now show that this release was a major milestone in pushing the brand “LibreOffice” across the Internet. One thing is sure: we went out of this release in a different state we entered it.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of Hungary is creating a resource centre to help the country’s public administrations implement free and open source software and open standards. One of the main goals of the centre is to make public administrations aware of the free and open source alternatives to proprietary ICT solutions.
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Openness/Sharing
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We are excited to announce the first ever Open Humanities Awards. There are €15,000 worth of prizes on offer for 3-5 projects that use open content, open data, or open source tools to further humanities teaching and research. Whether you’re interested in patterns of allusion in Aristotle, networks of correspondence in the Jewish Enlightenment, or digitising public domain editions of Dante, we’d love to hear about the kinds of open projects that could support your interest!
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Open Data
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The public service is revolting against reforms brought in by the federal government to make it easier and cheaper for people to use freedom-of-information laws.
Nearly all public service departments have made a submission to a review of the laws saying the changes have created more work than they can handle and question whether the changes are delivering ”value for money” for the government.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/public-servants-baulk-at-foi-changes-20130224-2ezmu.html#ixzz2LvIMrItB
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Open Access/Content
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The odd thing is this little tidbit comes at the very, very end of a longer article, most of which focuses on the DOJ telling Congressional staffers that part of the reason they went after Swartz with such zeal was because of his infamous Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. That might explain why they were so eager to arrest him, but it seems like the much bigger deal, considering all the concern about prosecutor discretion, that after they arrested him, they then didn’t want to look bad, which is why they continued to demand jailtime and felony convictions.
Many people have assumed all along that the Manifesto played a big role in the case — and the Manifesto has certainly been a lightening rod concerning Swartz’s activities. If you read the actual “manifesto” it’s not quite as extreme as some make it out to be — with much of it talking about taking stuff that is public domain, but still hidden behind walls, and making that available again. The controversial bit really is this paragraph, which starts out with legal activities, but gets much more ambiguous at the end:
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Programming
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LiveCode is like a next generation version of HyperCard. It is used to create simple one-off apps and utilities to solve day-to-day problems. As a production-quality, natural language hypermedia environment, LiveCode runs on all major operating systems (Linux, Mac, and Windows) and can generate code for all major desktop platforms, as well as all major mobile platforms (Android, iOS). They even got it up and running on the Raspberry Pi recently.
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I am stunned. And speechless. And can hardly believe the fact that this person actually decided to help me. And that the reason behind it was a reason I try to live myself: helping others where you can so that they help others, to make this blue marble a better place. To actually help someone you never met and most likely will never meet who is living thousands of kilometers away, is a beautiful thing to do. And just gave me a bit more faith in humanity.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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What if I told you police in your town could desensitize themselves to the idea of shooting a (armed) child, pregnant woman, or young mother, for just a couple of bucks? The “No More Hesitation” series from Law Enforcement Targets Inc. offers exactly that. For less than 99 cents per target, police can shoot at real-life images “designed to give officers the experience of dealing with deadly force shooting scenarios with subjects that are not the norm during training.”
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I have known of allegations of sexual pestering against Chris Rennard for at least five years, and I find it impossible to believe Nick Clegg has not known for longer.
But I am baffled as to what the current fuss is about. The allegations of which I know are not of criminal offences, but the sort of inappropriate workplace conduct which should lose you your job. And it was always my understanding that was why Rennard resigned as Lib Dem Chief Executive four years ago. Unless there are new allegations which are actually criminal (and I have still not heard that alleged) what is actually supposed to happen now?
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Revelation by Lindsey Graham marks the first time any US official has given a number for drone fatalities.
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Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of the Times report on the tussle between the Obama administration and Congress on whether to release the targeted killings memos or more information about the Benghazi attacks in order to get John Brennan confirmed.
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Hamid Karzai orders US elite force to leave Maidan Wardak province after local reports of disappearance of nine people
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Egypt’s Interior Ministry ordered 140,000 teargas canisters from the United States in January, which the US State Department only allowed to be exported without the company’s name or any indication they were made in the U.S., the Egypt Independent reports Friday.
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The map tells the story. To illustrate a damning new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,” recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it’s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.
Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set. It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.
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The United States has set up its first Sahelian drone base, in Niger, in order to carry on the war against “Al-Qaedah in the Islamic Maghreb”. The problem is that there is no such thing as “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb”. The US seems to confuse Al-Qaeda with Starbucks. Al-Qaeda does not have branches everywhere, a highly organised supply chain, and transfer pricing.
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Cablegate
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On his 355th day in custody awaiting a “speedy trial” as guaranteed by law, alleged LulzSec hacker and lifelong activist Jeremy Hammond had his second week in solitary confinement interrupted by yet another pretrial hearing.
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WikiLeaks has published over 40,000 secret documents regarding Venezuela, which show the clear hand of US imperialism in efforts to topple popular and democratically elected leader Hugo Chavez.
The documents, which date from July 2004 to December 2011 and which were published through WikiLeaks twitter account @wikileaks and which are now available on WikilLeaks Global Intelligence Files online, are based on emails taken from the private US-based intelligence company, Stratfor.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Japan has sent a giant military icebreaker to bolster its whaling fleet in the conflict with Sea Shepherd off the Australian Antarctic Territory, anti-whaling activists say.
The 12,500 tonne Shirase, operated by the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force, has appeared near whalers and Sea Shepherd activists 50 nautical miles off the coast of the territory, the group said.
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Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman, who made headlines in December for an unprovoked attack on Kwanzaa, has set his sights on another imagined enemy: renewable energy standards. Although Sen. Grothman’s latest move is just as ridiculous as his past efforts, this one is part of a national effort backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heartland Institute.
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Finance
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A US judge froze a Goldman Sachs account that regulators say was used to make suspicious trades in H J Heinz, after unknown traders failed to appear in court to defend their claims to the assets.
When the unidentified traders didn’t show up at a hearing on Friday in Manhattan, a US district judge, Jed Rakoff, said he would grant the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) request to freeze the Goldman Sachs account in Zurich until the case was resolved.
“They can hide, but their assets can’t run,” Mr Rakoff announced, saying he had granted the SEC’s request and signed the freeze order.
The agency said in its complaint that the trades came a day before Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital announced the US$23 billion (Dh84.4bn) takeover of Pittsburgh-based Heinz. The suspicious trading involved call-option contracts, the SEC said.
Goldman Sachs told the regulator it doesn’t have “direct access” to information about the beneficial owner behind transactions in the account. The New York-based bank told the agency the account holder is a Zurich private-wealth client, the SEC said. Goldman has said it is co-operating with authorities.
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In February 2010, just before the general election, chancellor George Osborne set out his economic objectives “against which I expect to be judged”. High among them was retaining Britain’s AAA credit rating. Now the credit rating agency Moody’s has stripped Britain of its AAA rating. So judging Osborne by his own criterion, he has failed.
Moody’s explained their decision as due to “continuing weakness in the UK’s medium-term growth outlook, with a period of sluggish growth which it now expects will extend into the second half of the decade”. Put simply, the economy isn’t growing, and isn’t expected to grow, and the implication of that for our debt to GDP ratio is dire.
In the short term, Moody’s decision is unlikely in itself to change anything, since the markets were expecting it and have factored it into their decisions. But it does signal that the government has failed. In three years we’ve gone from a triple A credit rating to a triple dip recession.
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Stop and frisk is definitely not sexy–and it might be not constitutional either. The practice of stopping people, mostly young men of color, and searching them without probable cause is a lot of things–racist on its face, for one.
But does it actually have anything to do with a reduction in gun violence? To think so, one would want to show that the stops wind up in weapons arrests. But the evidence is that they overwhelmingly do nothing of the sort.
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And these are the guys that Dudley wants to save, these self-serving miscreants who’re doing everything in their power to make the system more less safe, more unstable, and more crisis-prone?
The reason the money markets are so vulnerable is NOT because there’s no fix, but because the big money is blocking even modest changes to the existing system. Wall Street would rather put the whole system at risk, then lose even one-thin dime in profits.
More from Dudley: “The sheer size of banking functions undertaken outside commercial banking entities – even now, after the crisis – suggests that this issue must not be ignored. Pretending the problem doesn’t exist, or dealing with it only ex post through emergency facilities, cannot be consistent with our financial stability objectives.”
In other words, the Fed has no idea of how leveraged this gigantic, unregulated shadow banking system really is. All they know is that it poses unseen risks that WILL lead to another disaster. So, rather than implement rules that could improve stability–as one might expect from the nation’s chief regulator–Dudley wants a blank check to spend whatever-it-takes to prop up this ghastly system.
Unbelievable.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But it seems like their real problem with Chavez is that he gives away stuff. What do they mean by that?
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Censorship
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Freedom to Read Week begins on Feb. 24, bringing with it the perfect opportunity to kick the tires of democracy and make sure the old jalopy’s still running as she should.
What’s that you say? The bumper fell off when you touched it? The engine won’t turn over? That’s not so good. Better look under the hood
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While Geert Wilders was stamping around the country exercising his free speech about the impending Muslim takeover of Australia, on another more fundamental level, Thursday was a bad day for free speech and freedom of the press in Australia.
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Privacy
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New research published today by Big Brother Watch/ComRes finds that the majority of the British public are concerned about their online privacy (68%) with nearly a quarter (22%) saying that they are very concerned.
People are more likely to say that consumers are being harmed by big companies gathering large amounts of their personal data for internal use (46%) than they are to say that this enhances consumer experiences (18%).
As European data protection regulators prepare to take action against Google one year on from its revised privacy policy coming into force, more than 7 in 10 (71%) of the British public say that privacy and data regulators were right to investigate Google’s privacy policy and how it allows Google to collect and combine data on consumers.
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Civil Rights
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Why wasn’t Anonymous hacker-turned-FBI-informant Hector “Sabu” Monsegur sentenced as scheduled last week in New York? When I called Judge Preska’s chambers last Thursday to check whether the sentencing would actually take place the following day, the man on the other end of the line told me that it would not—but he couldn’t tell me why, saying only that the reason would probably show up in the federal court’s online PACER system at some point soon.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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After years of government planning, the anti-piracy Copyright Alert System (CAS) will go into effect Monday February 25th. This all in an effort to thwart and punish (without any prosecution) the online users who casually download films, music, and other media.
ISPs under the Six-Strikes policy will use a series of escalating messages first to warn, then throttle access, then revoke access to customers that have been tracked. Downloaders of the allegedly copyrighted material will be forced to acknowledge that they have received warnings or or watched the ‘educational material’ about ‘sharing is crime’.
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Posted in Patents at 5:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The troll which had gone after Microsoft (for cash) also went after Android developers based on a new report
THE Uniloc troll turns out to have attacked Linux already, even if indirectly. The article “Android developer fights evil patent troll” says the following:
Katie sez, “The video profiles software developer Austin Meyer, who is the target of a patent troll lawsuit involving a company called Uniloc, which owns a patent for the “System and Method for Preventing Unauthorized Access to Electronic Data.” Meyer’s flight simulator app X-Plane, like most paid applications on the Android market, uses the authorization system. Uniloc purchased the patent in question at a bankruptcy proceeding. Despite the enormous risk, and the enormous cost just to defend against a patent suit, Meyer is resolved to do so. The broader point of the video is that something needs to be done to stop patent trolls from simply buying patents in order to intimidate innovators into paying them a settlement. Patent trolls are a huge tax on innovation and add nothing to the marketplace.”
Reason.com, quite a popular Web site of alternative thinking, writes about “How Patent Trolls Kill Innovation”. It says:
“My statement to someone that is the victim of a patent troll lawsuit is that you are completely screwed,” says Austin Meyer, who is himself the target of a so-called “patent troll” lawsuit.
Meyer is a software developer and aviation enthusiast. His two passions intersected in the ’90s when he created a flight simulator called X-Plane, which quickly grew in popularity, outlasting even the once-popular Microsoft Flight Simulator. As many software developers do, Meyer made his application available on mobile devices like the iPhone and Android. And this is where he first ran into trouble.
What we must recognise, however, is that not only trolls are the problem; scope of patenting is a problem too. But since patent trolls usually use software patents (correlation was demonstrated before) a path in the right direction would be to eliminate software patents. In some sense, trolls are a symptom of software patents. █
Update: I have just found an E-mail that Uniloc had sent me through a PR proxy to whitewash its shameless activities. It said:
Roy,
Good afternoon. I saw your article on Techrights entitled “Apple’s and Microsoft’s Robbery of Knowledge Using Patents, i4i Case Might Reach SCOTUS” and found it extremely interesting. As you know, Sony Corporation, McAfee, Activision, Quark and two other companies have been sued by Uniloc USA for patent infringement. The suits stem from a massive case against Microsoft (in which Uniloc initially won $388 million in damages – the 5th largest award for Software infringement ever) and the suit is remarkable because of its potential reach: the technology in question became so popular as to be virtually ubiquitous today. The case against Microsoft is currently on appeal.
The lawsuit mentioned below follows closely on the heels of a wave of other suits by small businesses against goliaths (including two filed last month – Ebay was sued for $3.8 billion by XPRT and Apple, Google, Microsoft and others were sued by NTP, as you know, over patented smartphone technology), indicating small businesses are becoming more aggressive in fighting for their intellectual property rights.
By way of background, in 1992 software companies were losing billions to casual software copying. Uniloc was the first to combine the concept of product key and Hardware ID, and using both they created an airtight registration system (before this invention, most software relied on just a product key that Tom, Dick and Harry could take to college, give to their girlfriends and before you know it – millions of dollars in lost sales). For the first time, Uniloc’s invention locked software to a specific computer, making this casual copying next to impossible.
After patenting the invention in the early 90s, Uniloc commercialized the product through a licensing deal with IBM, and then began talks with Microsoft. Microsoft signed a non-disclosure agreement to not reverse engineer the product. But, as Microsoft’s own internal documents show – that’s exactly what they did, then used the software in Windows XP. Microsoft is a bellwether for significant trends in the software publishing industry, many other companies – including the ones named in the lawsuit – observed their success and took the information that Microsoft had made public to pursue or develop their own software activation systems.
Please let me know if you would like to speak with Brad Davis, CEO of Uniloc USA; I’d be happy to coordinate a conversation.
Thank you for your consideration.
Best,
Kelsey
Kelsey Nason
Account Executive
Hellerman Baretz Communications LLC
1325 Avenue of the Americas, 28th floor
New York, NY 10019
212.763.8582 Office
212.763.8304 Fax
646.673.0944 Mobile
knason@hellermanbaretz.com
www.hellermanbaretz.com
My reply was:
Hi Kelsey,
Will it be possible to do a short interview with Mr. Davis via E-mail. I
would love to hear his side of the story.
Kelsey’s reply was:
Roy,
Thank you for your interest in hearing Brad’s side of the story. I will check with Brad to see what his availability for today or tomorrow looks like for a short interview via email. When is best for you? Also, would you first email Brad directly?
Thanks again.
Best,
Kelsey
Suffice to say, seeing that he would have to face some hard questions, Brad was never giving an interview. To trolls, justifying what they do is hard.
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Posted in Patents at 5:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A collection of new articles bemoaning software patents for the most part
THERE have been many articles recently addressing the subject of software patents. Here are some that we found last week:
● Patent Lawyer: Software Patents “Restrict What Feels Like Our Treasured Personal Freedom (by Timothy B. Lee)
● Software Patents: A Test Run for Bipartisan Cooperation?
amesh Ponnuru writes in the New York Times today that Republicans need to stop idolizing Ronald Reagan’s policies, which were great in the 80s but no longer address the problems we face now.
● Clear Thinking on Software Patents
In the vigorous, ongoing debate about the state of America’s patent system — and the state of software patents, in particular — there are some legitimate issues that call for practical solutions, and there is a great deal of peripheral noise. To sort through and identify which is which, BSA and the National Association of Manufacturers co-hosted a packed briefing event this week on Capitol Hill.
● Software firms lobby Congress to defend patent protection
Software firms are coaxing U.S. lawmakers to protect patent law because they encourage tech innovation and protect research, and not be put off by the current court battles over intellectual property.
The U.S. patent system isn’t perfect, but lawmakers and judges shouldn’t solve current controversies by eliminating software patents altogether, executives with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Covia Labs, and Procter & Gamble said during a briefing last week before congressional staffers in Washington, D.C.
● Monsanto seed suit and software patents
It might seem strange that a dispute between a farmer and a seed company could have effects across Silicon Valley. Yet the outcome of Bowman vs. Monsanto, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, could be crucial to the way software companies fight for their patents.
Justices last week heard arguments from farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman and seed-making giant Monsanto over whether Bowman had rightfully used the company’s genetically modified and pesticide-resistant seeds, which are patent-protected. Bowman bought second-generation seeds from a third party selling them as feed, but instead used them to grow soybeans. Essentially, Monsanto argues that Bowman infringed its patents by using copied versions of its seeds, and a U.S. circuit court has agreed.
The impact of the justices’ decision will surely extend beyond farming and into the wider biotech industry. And, depending on exactly how the court rules, it could reach into the tumultuous battleground of software patents.
[...]
Many computing giants took notice of the case and filed an amicus brief in support of Monsanto through the Software Alliance, an advocacy group.
“Although the patent law issues in this case arise in the context of agricultural seeds, this Court’s resolution of those issues could have a significant effect on other parts of the economy, particularly technology companies,” reads the brief, cautioning that since computer software could be considered “self-replicating” – like seeds – the court could “facilitate software piracy on a broad scale” with a ruling that eliminates patent protection for Monsanto’s seeds.
Adobe, Apple, AVG, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Rosetta Stone and Symantec were the major tech giants listed as supporters of the brief.
We wrote about the BSA lobbying yesterday. █
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Further Recent Posts
- Watchtroll a Fake News Site in Lobbying Mode and Attack Mode Against Those Who Don't Agree (Even PTAB and Judges)
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
- The Productivity Commission Warns Against Patent Maximalism, Which is Where China (SIPO) is Heading Along With EPO
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
- Technical Failure of the European Patent Office (EPO) a Growing Cause for Concern
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
- Links 5/1/2017: Inkscape 0.92, GNU Sed 4.3
Links for the day
- Links 4/1/2017: Cutelyst 1.2.0 and Lumina 1.2 Desktop Released
Links for the day
- Financial Giants Will Attempt to Dominate or Control Bitcoin, Blockchain and Other Disruptive Free Software Using Software Patents
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
- New Article From Heise Explains Erosion of Patent Quality at the European Patent Office (EPO)
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
- Insensitivity at the EPO’s Management – Part V: Suspension of Salary and Unfair Trials
One of the lesser-publicised cases of EPO witch-hunting, wherein a member of staff is denied a salary "without any notification"
- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
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