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11.12.11

Former Microsoft Staff Makes Hadoop/Cloudera Financially Dependent

Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Servers at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The influence of money does its thing again, this time potentially affecting another GNU/Linux distribution

Cloudera is a startup that builds a GNU/Linux distribution. Just like some companies that serve Microsoft or turn from Linux focus to Microsoft (or Citrix), Cloudera is now getting financial dependence on Ignition, whose Microsoft roots we wrote about before [1, 2, 3, 4]. To quote the press release:

Ahead of its Hadoop World 2011 conference in New York City, Cloudera Inc., the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software and services, today announced it has closed a $40 million Series D funding round led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners and joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel. To support aggressive growth and increased momentum in the marketplace, Cloudera will use the funds to further expand its marketing and sales operations, and support key strategic initiatives.

At the moment, Hadoop is “making Linux gobble big data”. To quote this new article from The Register:

The Hadoop big data muncher has grown into more than Yahoo! conceived when it open-sourced its search engine indexing tool and its underlying file system back in 2009. And it has become exactly what open-source projects aspire to be: a centre of gravity around which a maelstrom of innovation coalesces.

It would not surprise us if Hadoop turned towards Windows (as least partly) after this cash injection from Ignition. See what Novell did for Microsoft in other "open" cloud efforts. █

“Patent Judges Want the Last Word Over Patent Law in Europe”

Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 9:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

ಠ_ಠ

Bardehle Pagenberg

Summary: Lawyers hijack people’s laws (for their own financial benefit) and the FFII issues an announcement of sorts

THE PATENTS ‘industry’ is one of patent lawyers and elevated lawyers (aka judges), who are extracting a lot of money from a real industry, essentially raising the prices of everything to justify their own parasitical existence. “Patent judges wants [sic] the last word over patent law in Europe,” writes the president of the FFII, “afraid of “unspecialized” European Court of Justice” (in IRC he told us that “patent judges wants EU monopoly over patent law”).

Here is the Microsoft Word document that shows this. We pulled the text out of this binary enclosure that requires Microsoft code/patents:

Bardehle Pagenberg
Prinzregentenplatz 7 D-81675 München
Tel: +49 89 92 80 50
Fax: +49 89 92 80 5444
pagenberg@bardehle.de
29 October 2011

Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court

Introduction
The European Patent Lawyers Association (EPLAW), comprising lawyers with many years of experience in European patent litigation, has been following closely the preparatory work for and the legal discussions regarding the creation of a European patent court system. In cooperation with the EPO Academy EPLAW has been organizing since 2005 the Venice Judges Forum, and several of its board members who are also members of the EU Commission’s Group of Experts have participated in shaping the texts of the relevant international documents. EPLAW members represent both large multinational corporations in all fields of technology as well as SMEs with very small patent portfolios.

As a result of discussions on the Draft Agreement on a United Patent Court and the Regulation on a Unitary Patent at the 7th Venice Judges Forum on October 29, 2011 which was also attended by the representatives of the Polish Presidency and the EU Commission EPLAW has concluded as follows.

Regulation on Unitary Patent Arts 6 – 8

EPLAW had requested in its Resolution of 27 September 2011 urgent amendments of the Agreement on a United Patent Court and the Unitary Patent respectively which has been explained and discussed in Venice in detail. Judges and litigators all agreed that what in EPLAW’s Resolution under par. II.f) had been described as the most serious drafting error, namely including Arts. 6 – 8 of the Regulation into the text of the Regulation on the Unitary Patent, must be corrected.

Supported by a legal opinion of Prof. Krasser, one of the most prestigious German scholars of patent law, EPLAW referred to the extremely negative consequences of the insertion of Art. 6 to 8 in the Regulation for the users which Prof. Krasser has explained in detail. The EPLAW Board has confirmed in Venice that its members fully approve also Prof. Krasser’s interpretation of Art. 118 TFEU. The following citations and key conclusions from the Opinion highlight the arguments which the judges and attorneys who are members of the Commission’s Expert Group had unanimously concluded already in their first discussion on this question in April of this year in Brussels.

3. The minimum requirement for the application of the authorisation is, according to Art. 118 (1) TFEU, merely that an intellectual property right is created by Union law. This itself achieves the necessary minimum harmonisation at least if the subject matter and core effect of the right in question is established identically in the law of the (participating) Member States….

..For this reason, the proposed Regulation can be restricted to creating the basis for the grant of unitary patents for the participating Member States….

..It is sufficient for the uniform protection required by Art. 118 (1) TFEU and the “same effect” of Art. 3 (2) of the proposed Regulation that the aforesaid core effect is unitary..

5. To date, it is undisputed that Art. 118 (1) TFEU, in the event that a unitary patent under Union law is created, does not require the preconditions for the grant to be regulated under Union law. On the contrary, the provisions of the EPC will continue to apply, and the EPC is not part of Union law…

..It would be logical to word the Regulation … in such a way that questions of the content and limits on the effect of such patents cannot give rise to a submission to the Court of Justice.

EPLAW is of the opinion that even if there may be legal reasons why one could come to the conclusion that including rules of substantive patent law into the Regulation, such rules are not required. Their rejection by the great majority of member states and practically all users results from the promise by the Commission and the Council that only judges with the highest qualification and experience in patent law should deal with patent litigation between private parties, so that an involvement of the ECJ beyond the EU legal order as it exists today should be avoided, otherwise the entire project could be endangered. Users request an efficient and predictable procedure before highly experienced judges which they would not get in proceedings which would include referrals on substantive law to the ECJ.

The bottom line is, the legal system in Europe does not serve its citizens. It seems to be serving either the patent lawyers or the multinationals whom they make money from (to distort the competition). Klaus-Heiner Lehne is a good example of that. █

Links 12/11/2011: More Sabayon Linux 7 ‘Flavours’

Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Goodbye BIOS, hello UEFI

    When you turn on your computer, a primitive system that dates back more than 30 years, the basic input/output system (BIOS), turns your cold hardware into a functioning system that your operating system can then boot from. Alas, it’s sadly out of date. PC makers have slowly been replacing BIOS with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). That’s all well and good, but one UEFI feature, Secure Boot, could be used to lock PCs into being only able to boot one operating system: Windows 8.

  • iOS upgrade swells iPhone battery-suckage grief

  • Security

  • Finance

    • For Bank Of America, Debit Fees Extend To Unemployment Benefits

      usiness plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

      To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds. She could visit a Bank of America ATM free of charge. But this small community in the state’s rural center, her hometown, does not have a Bank of America branch. Neither do the surrounding towns where she drops off her kids at school and attends church.

    • TOM THE DANCING BUG: Whose Encampment Should Crowd-Control Police Be Breaking Up?

  • Civil Rights

    • The WikiLeaks-Fueled Erosion of Civil Liberties Has Begun

      When a federal judge ruled that Twitter must reveal the private data of three WikiLeaks associates on Thursday, privacy advocates died a little inside. The two organizations that had defended the three users, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundations (EFF), immediately filed mournful blog posts that respectively raised doubts about the United States government’s secretive handling of the case and highlighted grave message the ruling sends about the future of privacy on the internet. But Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Valentine-DeVries sums up the implications of the case best with a leading question: “Should the government be able to collect information related to your Internet use without a warrant?” We now know that the federal court’s answer is, “Yes.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Turncoat EU Parliament Gives Up on Defending Free Wireless Communications

      In discussions on the future of wireless communications policies, the EU Parliament is giving in to Member States by accepting a watered-down version1 of the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme. Last Spring, the Parliament had made very constructive proposals in favour of open spectrum policies, calling2 for citizen-controlled wireless communications. Sadly, the first major effort to harmonise spectrum policy in Europe is being held back by EU governments’ conservatism and the Parliament’s surrender.

    • Digital Divide Persists Even as Broadband Adoption Grows

      Broadband Internet adoption has skyrocketed over the last decade in the U.S, though adoption hasn’t been entirely evenly spread across all Americans. That’s the conclusion from a new Exploring the Digital Nation report from The Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

      The report is a followup to one released in 2010 that came to a similar set of conclusions about the so-called digital divide between those that have broadband Internet access and those that do not.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Proudhon: if IP is property, is it theft?

      Here is a thought provoking article on how the distribution of income gives the top one percent such a disproportionate share of output link here. It finds the source in French anarchist Proudhon’s cry that “Property is theft,” and asserts “The biggest “theft” by the [richest] 1 percent has been of the primary source of wealth – knowledge – for its own benefit.”

Boycott SUSE (and ‘Open’ SUSE) for Colluding in Microsoft’s Extortion of GNU/Linux

Posted in Microsoft, Novell, OpenSUSE at 8:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Reminder of why SUSE needs to be shunned, even if it comes with the “Open” marketing label

MICROSOFT GETS away with racketeering (so far) by bribing SUSE to do as Microsoft pleases and now that the release of OpenSUSE is imminent and Microsoft’s vandalism of GNU/Linux continues we wish to stress again that it would be wise to avoid any form of SUSE (including the new OpenSUSE) and suggest to others that they do the same. SUSE needs to quite simply perish and disappear. The longer it sticks around, the more legitimacy Microsoft’s extortionate claims against GNU/Linux will have. It’s just Microsoft tax, which comes at the expense of real GNU/Linux players such as Debian or RHEL. The news is full of evidence of that all the time.

It is paid SUSE staff which keeps looking for free testers. Do not give them the privilege. Do not participate and do not download OpenSUSE. To quote Jos (‘community’ manager, appointed by Attachmate/Novell for a cheque):

Currently, we run the test suites of the OBS, osc and osc2 code-bases and publish their results to a newly created mailing list, obs-tests@opensuse.org.

.org, but belonging as a trademark too to SUSE, which is partly funded by Microsoft for Microsoft's benefit and welfare. Do not be misled by PR. It's not a community project. █

Bill Gates and SUSE

11.11.11

Links 11/11/2011: Vodafone Ubuntu Webbook, Parted Magic 11.11.11

Posted in News Roundup at 6:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Ken Starks: The Unsung Hero

    Ken Starks is, by all standards, a normal guy. He lives in the Austin, Texas area, worked hard his entire life, raised a family, and has lived a mostly good life. Around 2005, Ken was pressure washing a building 38 feet in the air, when the lift failed. He came crashing to the ground, fracturing his spine at the neck. Thus ended one career, and began a new one.

    Ken is an extraordinary person. Not because he tried to be. If you ask him about what he does, he is very modest about it, and quick to push the credit off to other people. But without Ken, projects like The Helios Initiative wouldn’t exist.

  • HeliOS Seeks Official Wallpaper

  • Desktop

    • Vodafone Ubuntu Webbook

      An Ubuntu Webbook was recently launched in South Africa by Vodafone, to be distributed by local telecoms carrier Vodacom. Netbooks have been squeezed out by budget tablets and ultrabooks in the northern hemisphere, but in a market where access to computers is poor, netbooks represent a great stepping stone between full-sized laptops and limited-capability mobile phones. Then there’s the free Linux OS which helps keep costs down, and voila – the Vodafone Webbook.

    • Vodafone Webbook review

      Tablet PCs may be all the rage, but most of them can be fairly pricey. Sure, there are units like the Aakash that aim to lower the price barrier substantially, but some may want something a little more fully featured, which is where the Vodafone Webbook comes in.

    • The Computer I Need

      Could I buy a refurbished one from you?” We got him an old laptop that fit the budget of a PhD researcher. The next week when we spoke with him his speech had doubled in speed. It continues to increase gradually and now nearly matches a typical speech tempo. This is an extreme example, but try it yourself: take note of what type of computer someone uses and see if it correlates to the way they speak and interact.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • A Proper Solution To The Linux ASPM Problem

      At long last, it looks like there is an adequate solution to the Active State Power Management (ASPM) problem in the Linux kernel , a.k.a. the well-known and wide-spread power regression in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which has been causing many laptops to go through significantly more power than they should. This is not another workaround, but rather a behavioral change in the kernel to better decide when the PCI Express ASPM support should be toggled.

    • A Proper Solution To The Linux ASPM Problem

      At long last, it looks like there is an adequate solution to the Active State Power Management (ASPM) problem in the Linux kernel , a.k.a. the well-known and wide-spread power regression in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which has been causing many laptops to go through significantly more power than they should. This is not another workaround, but rather a behavioral change in the kernel to better decide when the PCI Express ASPM support should be toggled.

      Since the release of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel in March of this year, a significant number of mobile and desktop systems using this release (or any post-2.6.38 kernel) have noticed a significant increase in power consumption. I had spotted Ubuntu 11.04 development releases going through much more power than earlier releases and then traced it down to being a regression within the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and affecting all distributions using this kernel. The Phoronix Test Suite stack automatically bisected the issue down to being a change in how ASPM is handled.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • XFCE: Your Lightweight, Speedy, Fully-Fledged Linux Desktop

      As far as Linux goes, customization is king. Not only that, but the customization options are so great it might make your head spin. If you’ve been following my last couple of articles, you might notice that I’ve been stressing that fact quite a bit. I mentioned the differences between the major desktop environments available on Linux in this article, and then realized that we at MakeUseOf have only been talking extensively about two of the three desktop environments that I mentioned. So, without further ado, here’s your crash course on XFCE.

    • Meet Kellogg’s Sludge Puppet

      A new puppet’s in town! His name is Karden, and according to his PR, he shows kids how much fun gardening can be. What parents and teachers aren’t told is that he is actually a marketing tool for sewage sludge merchant Kellogg Garden Products.

      Books featuring Karden, available at common bookstores, and an “Idea Factory” website devoted to him, are full of gardening activities for parents and teachers to do with their kids. Karden throws free kids’ gardening events at bookstores and hardware stores.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Plasma 4.8 Boosts Speed, Power Management

        KDE’s Aaron Seigo has a new blog post to share about improvements to Plasma Workspaces in the forthcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.8.

        Among the improvements that Seigo talks about in this Plasma Workspaces 4.8 posting is the OpenGL ES and Compositing Performance improvements (thanks to Martin Gräßlin’s continued work on KWin), lots of bug fixes, and improved power management. The improved power management is also fixing a large number of stability/predictability-related bugs, such as for handling multi-screen power management situations, etc.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Pardus Corporate 2 Kurumsal – quick, powerful, rogue

      I have confessed several times that KDE is my favorite Desktop Environment. And even more, that I prefer KDE3 to KDE4. That’s why every time I approach Linux distribution with KDE3 on top, I am full of awe.

    • SuperX 1 Screen Shots

    • New Releases

      • Parted Magic 11.11.11 brings Linux 3.1

        Parted Magic lead developer Patrick J. Verner has announced the release of version 11.11.11 of his open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Based on the Linux 3.1 kernel, the new release introduces a new versioning system (the previous version was 6.7) and upgrades a number of the included applications.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Releases Even More Choice

        Like regular Sabayon 7, these fresh spins come with Linux 3.1, Ext4 filesystem is default (btrfs supported), support for encryption, fast install, lightweight GCC implementation, and over 4000 software updates. Some of the software included on the E17 CD is Ristretto image viewer, Midori, Pidgin, Xnoise media player, and more. More can be easily installed from Sabayon’s well-stocked repositories using the software manager.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • AMD decTOP running Debian Squeeze

        After upgrading my AMD decTOP with 160GB hdd, I’ve decided to install a fresh new operating system on it for some side-project that I’m working on. I choose to install Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.3 (Squeeze) on the machine.

        The machine is currently running lighttpd web server with PHP5, samba server and sshd (using public-key authentication).

      • FileTea now available in Debian

        In the past few weeks I’ve been preparing the Debian packages of FileTea and its companion EventDance. They’re finally available.

        FileTea is a free, web-based file sharing system that just works. It only requires a browser, and no user registration is needed. If you want to know more about it, you can read my previous blog post. For a more detailed description, read Nathan Willis’s excellent article on LWN.net. There have been a few changes since that article (HTTPS support in particular) but it’s still the best one you can find on the net.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Clone Wolf: Protector Is Out For GNU/Linux !
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 240

            In this Issue we cover:

            * Ubuntu Community mourns the loss of Andre Gondim
            * Ubuntu on phones, tablets, TV’s and smart screens everywhere
            * End of support for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook and ARM – 2011/10/29
            * UDS Video Interviews
            * Community Acknowledgements and Success Stories
            * Ubuntu Stats
            * LoCo News
            * Ubuntu Cloud News
            * Nathan Haines: Ubucon SCaLE10X Needs You!
            * David Wonderly: The Ignored Group of Ubuntu
            * Daniel Holbach: Survey Summary: Getting involved with Ubuntu development
            * Scott Lavender: A Kernel for All Seasons
            * Jorge Castro: Power user’s team 12.04 roadmap.
            * Edubuntu: Edubuntu WebLive surpasses 100 000 sessions
            * Canonical Design Team: Juju: a logo with a story
            * Mark Shuttleworth: Community growth and development
            * Summaries from the Ubuntu Developer Summit -P
            * In The Press
            * In The Blogosphere
            * Ubuntu One for Windows Bringing new users to Linux?
            * Windows 8 plot to lock out Linux
            * Other Articles of Interest
            * Upcoming Meetings and Events
            * Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10
            * And much more

          • Flavours and Variants

            • All change in the Linux world.

              With the release of Ubuntu 11.10, we have Canonical’s Unity desktop offered to us. Many Linux users are up in arms, some love the new look, and others have moved away from Ubuntu to pastures new, not happy at all with the direction the desktop is going. On the face of it, Unity on 11.10 is an improvement over 11.04 but for me, indifference and disappointment has relegated the live CD to the pile of ‘Works, but not for me’, of which there are a growing number. Kubuntu 11.04 on the other hand, is very polished, smooth and is working well on my i5 4Gb desktop, with only a few minor worries creeping in since I installed it on the day of release back in October.

              I keep abreast of the new innovations that are to be found with the modern Linux desktop. Gnome 3, KDE 4.7 and now, today, a release candidate of Linux Mint 12 with a radical take on Gnome 3 (Clem and the LM team have chosen this over Unity) and have developed scripts to make the user feel more at ease with the new desktop. The 1Gb .iso file has just this minute finished downloading, so I’ll be burning it and trying it out to get first impressions. At this point, I have only seen a screenshot on the Linux Mint blog, so I am a little apprehensive as to what I will find. Watch this space….

            • Linux Mint 12 RC1 Review
            • LinuxMint 12 Lisa first Look | Screenshots Tour
            • Linux Mint: The new Ubuntu?
            • Linux Mint

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • HTC’s Anti-Apple Strategy Wins in U.S. Smartphone Market: Tech

          Executive Officer Peter Chou got the call when Sprint Nextel Corp. wanted to develop the first smartphone for a higher-speed wireless network last year.

          Sprint needed the phone fast, with a design that would stand out in the market. No problem, Chou told the executives. HTC’s engineers spent about seven months building the device with Sprint and launched the Evo last June. The debut gave Sprint bragging rights for the first fourth-generation phone in the U.S., and won Taiwanese manufacturer HTC strong support at a major carrier.

        • Android Builders Summit CFP Now Open

          Just a few weeks back from LinuxCon Europe in Prague and we’re already starting to cultivate content for next year. Most notably, I am please to announce that the Call for Participation for the Android Builders Summit is now open. We created ABS last year at the behest of our members who are vendors in the Android Ecosystem who needed a place to collaborate with their peers on systems level engineering and discussion of core issues and opportunities when designing Android devices.

        • Amazon App store for Android updated

          The Amazon App Store for Android version 2.0 has rolled out in preparation for the US launch of the Kindle Fire.

          With the Amazon Kindle Fire rolling out for the US market on 15 November, Amazon knows that its app strategy is a central pillar to supporting its new venture.

        • aNag – Android Nagios app

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Digitimes Research: Branded tablet PC shipments to grow 60% in 2012

        Global branded tablet PC shipments in the fourth quarter are not expected to see growth creating concerns among market watchers whether the tablet PC market has already reached saturation, but Digitimes Research senior analyst James Wang believes that the zero-growth in the fourth quarter is the joint affect of Japan’s earthquake on March 11 and the global economic downturn, which should not become an obstacle that restrains the tablet PC market’s growth in the future.

Free Software/Open Source

  • A balanced profit distribution is the way to do business, says Acer founder

    Acer founder Stan Shih, at a public meeting with Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt, pointed out that an open source system allows enterprises, retail channels and consumers to all receive profits and it also helps the ecosystem to reach a balance, while ensures players maintain long-term operations, and is the way for enterprises to operate their business.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 15 update closes holes, updates Flash

        Google has released version 15.0.874.120 of Chrome. The maintenance and security update to the WebKit-based browser upgrades the V8 JavaScript engine to version 3.5.10.23, addresses several vulnerabilities, and includes the recent Flash Player 11.1 release, which also closes critical security holes.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 8 arrives with improved add-on control

        As expected, the Mozilla Project has officially announced the release of version 8.0 of its open source Firefox web browser. Based on the Gecko 8 engine, Firefox 8 adds Twitter as a new default search option for select locales (more locales will be added in the future) and improves how add-ons are controlled.

      • Mozilla Reinvents Web Video With Popcorn 1.0

        Video on the web has always been a bit disappointing. After all, it’s pretty much just like television, only smaller. Unlike the rest of the web, video is just as much a passive experience in your browser as it is anywhere else.

      • Hands-on: Firefox’s experimental new native Android interface

        Mozilla is working on a major overhaul of the Firefox mobile user interface for Android. The developers are transitioning away from XUL—the cross-platform user interface toolkit used by Firefox on the desktop—in favor of native widgets. This major design change will offer smoother performance, better platform integration, and a look and feel that is a bit more consistent with the rest of the Android environment.

        We looked at the new native Firefox mobile tablet interface when it surfaced in September for Honeycomb devices. Mozilla’s mobile team is currently preparing to deliver a similar native interface for the smartphone flavor of the browser. It shares visual style of the tablet implementation, but is designed to fit well on a phone-sized screen.

      • Mozilla Celebrates The 7th Birthday Of Firefox Web Browser

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Solaris goes to 11

      Oracle has updated its Unix-based operating system Solaris, adding some features that would make the OS more suitable for running cloud deployments, as well as integrating it more tightly with other Oracle products, the company announced Wednesday.

      “We looked at some of the big challenges that people were having in deploying cloud infrastructure, either in a private cloud or public cloud,” said Charlie Boyle, senior director of product marketing. “In the release, we engineered out some of the complexity in managing a cloud infrastructure, and made it possible to run any Solaris application in a cloud environment.”

    • Oracle Debuts Solaris 11

  • CMS

    • Everything should be open source, says WordPress founder

      Can relying on open source technology as the backbone for an entire company really be feasible? WordPress.com’s founder Matt Mullenweg certainly seems to think so.

      “I believe morally and philosophically that not just software, but everything should be open source,” asserted Mullenweg, while speaking at the GigaOM RoadMap 2011 summit on Thursday evening.

      It’s a bold statement, but it’s the ethos that Mullenweg admirably stuck to, pointing out that sites like Wikipedia replaced Encyclopedia Britannica, and how far Android has gone for mobile.

    • SoundOff: Best open source CMS updates of 2011

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • AVM cannot prohibit modification of GPL router firmware

      Cybits AG’s Surf-Sitter software is parental control software which allows a parent to set times when surfing is allowed or when a web filter is enabled. The software is also available for installation on routers like the Fritzbox; when installing, the application connects to the router and downloads, modifies and reloads the router’s firmware onto the device. AVM said that this was a violation of its copyright and in January last year, it obtained a preliminary injunction which prohibited Cybits AG from distributing that software or any other which edited the router firmware or used other parts of that firmware unchanged. At the same time, it filed a case against Cybits.

    • Court rejects AVM’s claims opposing third party modifications of GPL software

Leftovers

  • Apple’s iPad not so shiny once you get it home

    Many Brits can’t be bothered to use their fruity fondleslabs once they have them and don’t think they’re worth the money, a new study has found.
    The survey, by money-off coupon site MyVoucherCodes, showed that over a quarter of UK iPad users only used their Apple tablet once a week and one in 10 don’t even bother with it that much.

    Only 42 per cent of the 1,531 users asked said they use their iPad every day.

  • Apple’s iPhone 4S Battery Troubles Now Joined By New Problems

    Apple says it’s still investigating battery drain issues with the iPhone 4S after some users complained that the iOS 5.0.1 update didn’t solve their problems. But now Apple is facing new gripes that the iOS 5.0.1 update is causing more problems with the iPhone 4S including; microphone failures, Wi-Fi signal loss, and cellular network reception issues, according to reports.
    “The recent iOS software update addressed many of the battery issues that some customers experienced on their iOS 5 devices,” Apple said in a statement to All Things Digital. “We continue to investigate a few remaining issues.”

    Apple released iOS 5.0.1 on Thursday, claiming that it would fix iPhone 4S battery drain. The update also added multitouch gestures for the original iPad and fixed a few other issues. While some iPhone users said the update solved their battery problems, others said the battery suckage was just as bad, or worse, than before.

  • Brit tech writer stunned to be the voice of Siri

    While the world and its dog is getting all excited about Apple’s Siri software, Siri itself turns out to be a former British tech journalist called Jon Briggs who was jolly surprised at his new role.
    Jon Briggs quit writing about technology to do voice-over work, and recorded “Daniel” for Scansoft, which subsequently merged with Nuance, the outfit that works with Apple on Siri.

    He said he had no idea that he was the voice of Siri until he saw an advert with his voice on it the telly.
    Briggs told the Daily Telegraph that he did a set of recordings with Scansoft five or six years ago, for text-to-speech services.

    It involved him saying five thousand sentences over three weeks, spoken in a very particular way and only reading flat and even.

  • Security

    • Critical bug in ProFTPD closed
    • Hackers Hijack Millions of Computers in ‘Massive’ Fraud Case

      The U.S. charged seven people with a “massive” computer intrusion scheme that used malicious software to manipulate online advertising, diverted users to rogue servers and infected more than 4 million computers in more than 100 countries.

      One Russian and six Estonians were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy in a 27-count indictment unsealed today by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The cyber-hijacking victims included at least a half million individuals, businesses in the U.S. and government agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Bharara said.

  • Finance

    • Zuccotti Park’s Burgeoning Micro-Neighborhoods May Indicate Deeper Divisions

      Protesters at Occupy Wall Street insist that they are a completely leaderless movement with a purely horizontal structure. But where some see simple diversity — a self-proclaimed goal of OWS — others see the creep of an insidious hierarchy, most clearly seen in the emerging micro-neighborhoods in Zuccotti Park.

      At the northeast corner of the park is one of the tidiest regions of the Occupy Wall Street movement: the People’s Library, with more than 3,000 volumes and staffed largely by professional book handlers. Just south of the Library, the General Assembly — the evening meeting where collective decisions are made — is held, close to many of the working group stations that are dominated by college-educated professionals.

    • The Road to Serfdom

      The markets are again in free-fall and, once again, a lazy Mediterranean profligate is to blame. This time, it’s an Italian, rather than a Greek. No, not Silvio Berlusconi, but his fellow countryman, Mario Draghi, the new head of the increasingly spineless European Central Bank.

      At least the Alice in Wonderland quality of the markets has finally dissipated. It was extraordinary to observe the euphoric reaction to the formation of the European Financial Stability Forum a few weeks ago, along with the “voluntary” 50% haircut on Greek debt (which has turned out to be as ‘voluntary’ as a bank teller opening up a vault and surrendering money to someone sticking a gun in his/her face). To anybody with a modicum of understanding of modern money, it was obvious that the CDO like scam created via the EFSF would never end well and that the absence of a substantive role for the European Central Bank would prove to be its undoing.

    • Rove’s Crossroads GPS Attacks Occupy Movement, Elizabeth Warren

      Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is running an ad in Massachusetts attacking the Occupy Wall Street movement and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren with some questionable assertions.

      Warren, a Harvard law professor and longtime critic of financial gambling who oversaw the development of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is running even with incumbent Scott Brown in a high-stakes race for the U.S. Senate. Crossroads GPS is a secretly-funded 501(c)(4) group affiliated with Rove’s American Crossroads. A heavy hitter in the campaign spending arena, the group spent $17 million in the 2010 elections, and is expected to spend $150 million in 2012. The group is led by Stephen Law, former general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Crossroads GPS worked closely with the Chamber in 2010 to fight the Wall Street reforms that Warren supported.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Insurers are Recycling a Front Group to Cheat Us Out of Benefits

      The special interests seeking to gut those portions of the health reform law that would be of greatest benefit to consumers clearly believe there is no such thing as historical memory in Washington.

      Why else would they bring one of their old front groups out of the storage locker, with just a single new word added to its name? A front group designed to persuade Americans that what they might have thought was in their best interests really isn’t after all.

      In the late 1990s, health insurers and their most reliable business allies — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) — set up a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition. Back then, the industry’s target was the Patient’s Bill of Rights, which would have made insurance firms behave in a more consumer-friendly way. Among other things, the bill of rights would have forced insurers to make an external review process available to health plan enrollees who were denied coverage for doctor-ordered treatments. It also would have given enrollees an expanded right to sue their insurers for wrongful denials of coverage.

    • Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Fails in Effort to Smear Critic

      An effort by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) to brand a frequent critic as a “liar” has been contradicted by a recording of the alleged deceit. AFP has not issued a retraction.

      On November 8, Americans for Prosperity published a blog post on their website titled “Lee Fang Lies: The Real Face of ‘Think Progress.’” Fang is a researcher and blogger for Think Progress and has written many articles about the Koch brothers, including about their business practices and lobbying efforts, and about their role in manipulating the Tea Party.

  • Copyrights

    • Warner Bros: we issued takedowns for files we never saw, didn’t own copyright to

      In a Monday court filing, Warner Brothers admitted that it has issued takedown notices for files without looking at them first. The studio also acknowledged that it issued takedown notices for a number of URLs that its adversary, the locker site Hotfile, says were obviously not Warner Brothers’ content.

      Hotfile has been locked in a legal battle with Hollywood studios since February; the studios accuse the site of facilitating copyright infringement on a massive scale. Hotfile counters that it is immune from liability for the infringements of its users because it complies with the notice-and-takedown procedures established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But Hotfile has also tried to turn the tables by arguing that one of the studios, Warner Brothers, has itself violated the DMCA by issuing bogus takedown requests.

Microsoft Lobbyists Help Microsoft Dodge Charges of Patent Extortion and Then Smear Google Instead

Posted in Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Influence For Sale, Inc.

Windows Phone 7 Series

Summary: Microsoft Florian and other spinners whom Microsoft paid are performing a reality distortion exercise that they try to push into the press as “independent”, in their usual deceitful ways

“Microsoft [is] facing Android patent competition probe” says this one new headline about Microsoft’s crusade to make money from products it never developed at all.

Barnes & Noble has asked US antitrust regulators to investigate if Microsoft is abusing its position by demanding royalties from companies making kit running Android software.

The move was revealed in a letter from the book seller to competition regulators and comes in the wake of Microsoft taking legal action earlier this year over five patents that it claims were infringed in the Nook ebook reader.

As Techrights‘ Ryan puts it in his interesting new blog:

Moving further on, into Microsoft’s patent racket operations. You might remember that Foxconn, a global manufacturer of PC and Mac motherboards (sometimes sold under different brand names), was conspiring with Microsoft a few years ago to break non-Windows operating systems with corrupt ACPI implementations in the board’s BIOS firmware. As a reward for carrying water for Microsoft in their Corrupt PC BIOS Initiative :) , Foxconn ended up being named as a defendant in Microsoft’s patent-racketeering lawsuit against e-reader maker Barnes & Noble.

Microsoft is also attacking Android with copyright FUD. A lawyer previously working for Microsoft (he tried to hide payments from Microsoft, without success) is at it again: [via]

And, it should be clear, neither does a position paper from a lawyer possibly working on behalf of a client. Or, yes, even a blog.

Is this a reference to Microsoft Florian, who loves to amplify the FUD from Naughton while always portraying Google as a patent aggressor? These lobbyists need to be exposed and people who cite them without naming their clients (that make a conflict of interest) ought to be notified. Microsoft has a well-funded PR campaign going to whitewash its extortion campaign. The regulators are coming, so Microsoft depends on a lot of spin and “perception management” (which Florian has been selling as a product). In his so-called ‘blog’, Florian is now spinning the B&N complaint against B&N. It’s a load of nonsense, but that’s all that Microsoft can offer at this stage. It just needs some mouthpieces that appear external to the company and it pays them for it. Watch out for Microsoft playing dirty by recruiting corruptible people who masquerade as “analysts” and mass-mail journalists for their clients’ agenda. How despicable. █

Patent Lawyers Compare Patent Monopolies to Children

Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Will somebody think about the patents!!

Parent with patent

Summary: A glance at the sordid mess created by patents, companies’ real attitude towards patents, and propaganda from patent lawyers who monetise this mess, where legal instruments subvert real competition

IN THE MIDST of patent wars we learn about the surge in number of lawsuits, which are by no means indicators of progress. The patents storm raises the cost of everything and eliminates a lot of companies. Small companies are unable to compete and according to Rupert Murdoch’s press, “more small tech companies in the Bay Area are prioritizing patenting their own inventions as a defense and seeking patent services from law firms and businesses that help defend patent suits.”

“This means that resources get funnelled into unwanted areas rather than development.”So they get patents not because they like patents but because they are afraid of lawsuits. This means that resources get funnelled into unwanted areas rather than development. Can anyone still argue in favour of patents as facilitators of innovation? With a straight face even? That’s just the sad state in the United States and over in Europe there are attempts to make things equally bad. Well, software patents are “back again in the UK, data being processed within the computer was a physical concept, not an abstract one,” writes the FFII’s president. He cites this patent lawyers’ blog which implicitly compares children to patents (yes, honestly!):

As a caring society, we seek to protect both our children and our inventions. Occasionally one is presented with an opportunity to protect the two simultaneously. One such opportunity came in Protecting Kids the World Over (PKTWO) Ltd, in re [2011] EWHC 2720 (Pat), a decision of Mr Justice Floyd (Patents Court, England and Wales) from 26 October which somehow got lost in the wash. This decision touches once again on the potential exclusion from patent protection of an invention which looks jolly useful and, in this Kat’s opinion, would be bound to sell well — but which is afflicted by the twin blights of being implemented by computer and of being a simulation of a mental act.

Those lawyers from London crave patents on algorithms just because it would mean more business (e.g. litigation and trolling) for them. Beware those parasitical elements that write about patents. To them, “innovation” means ways of bamboozling a judge into imposing a fine on innocent parties, passing money from one company to another by bypassing real competition. Microsoft is a good example of this and we shall cover it in the next post. █

The Acacia Tax on Life

Posted in Patents at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Troll toll booth

Washing machine

Summary: How a patent troll helps reinforce the claims that software patents have a mortal cost, too

The Acacia troll (legalised extortion) has not been mentioned here for a while, but Acacia is still busy extorting and/or suing companies that actually make stuff. The latest example is a company that makes medical software, which makes one wonder about the human toll of patents.

Going back to 2007, we wrote a great deal about the subject of patents that restrict use of knowledge that either: 1) refers to anatomy/genetics or 2) can be applied to saving of lives. Some of the most compelling arguments against patents piggyback the medical field as a good example of the high societal cost of patents. It is a bit like the “think about the children” line. More on that in the next post. █

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