Posted in Apple, Microsoft, Vista 7, Windows at 11:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A couple of new articles from the British press and one which is a parody
• Apple voids warranties over cigarette smoke, users say
A Mac user claims that Apple voided her warranty and refused to repair her machine because it was “contaminated” with cigarette smoke.
• iPhone worm hjacks ING customers
The second worm to infect jailbroken iPhone users reportedly targets customers of Dutch online bank ING Direct.
Surfers visiting the site with infected devices are redirected to a phishing site designed to harvest online banking login details, the BBC reports. ING Direct told the BBC it planned to warn users’ of the attack via its website, as well as briefing front line call centre staff on the threat.
• Windows 7
The “Windows 7 Launch Party” ads are proof that the Homo Sapiens are dividing into new species. Whole teams of marketing executives, PR hacks and television “people” got together and produced this thing without once realizing it was a parody of human interaction. And they aren’t rogue mutants; those are modern jobs – entire tax brackets filled with things who can no longer communicate with real people without a team of fake-smiling market-focussed minorities. And it’s interesting to see that, on some survey somewhere, “old” is now a token demographic.
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Posted in Corel, GNU/Linux, Mandriva, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Patents, Red Hat, Turbolinux, Ubuntu, Xandros at 11:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sure seems like it
Summary: How four vendors of desktop GNU/Linux lost their direction after joining Microsoft’s software patents racket
LINSPIRE/LINDOWS is no more, as things went downhill after it had signed a patent deal with Microsoft. It sold out, so GNU/Linux users did not give it a second chance. As for Novell, it seems heavily focused these days on Silverlight and .NET. Moonlight and Mono are no longer even targeting GNU/Linux; Novell releases Mono products for platforms like the Apple iPhone, Mac OS X, even Windows [1, 2], with similar impact on the Nintendo Wii. Novell has essentially been transformed by the Microsoft deal just like Corel was.
“Perhaps there has not been high demand for their $50 Microsoft “patent protection” product for Debian derivatives.”Back in June, Xandros publicly revealed that is was not a GNU/Linux company anymore. “We are kind of getting away from being a Linux company” is the exact quote. Perhaps there has not been high demand for their $50 Microsoft "patent protection" product for Debian derivatives.
Well, based on this new press release (also here), Xandros walks further away from GNU/Linux, which is good news given what the company has done to GNU/Linux (and for Microsoft).
Xandros today announced the launch of Apps2Market, the first true cross-platform white label application store and m-commerce service. Apps2Market creates custom app store environments that are capable of reaching users with any digital content and applications in a growing, fragmented internet-connected device market.
Here is a short article about this.
Calling it the “first rue cross-platform white label applications store,” Apps2Market is aimed at creating an app store for any platform out there, so long as it’s Intel or ARM-based web-devices. The idea is that software vendors, automotive vendors, or any other manufacturers can create a marketplace custom-tailored for applications specific to the device they’re selling.
The last time we wrote about Turbolinux we showed that it too had lost its direction after the patent deal with Microsoft. Deals with Microsoft are a death knell. By contrast, companies like Mandriva, Red Hat and Canonical stayed focused. The conclusion is obvious. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, Ubuntu at 10:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Constructive suggestions for Canonical to save disk space and also remove a controversial dependency that slows Ubuntu down
SEVERAL days ago we wrote about the decision to put F-Spot in Fedora (GNOME) and also to remove GIMP from Ubuntu under the presumption that F-Spot can replace it for most uses. Putting Photoshop apologists aside, GIMP is a valuable program that should stay for the following reasons, as Ravi puts them:
- One of the ways of introducing people to alternative software is to include it in the default installation of Linux and have it readily accessible to the users from the menu. Removing GIMP would mean encouraging people to think that Linux is “not ready for serious users.”
- If saving space on the disk is the major issue, why not replace OpenOffice.org with equivalent software such as Abiword and Gnumeric ? After all, how many general users of Linux (or Windows for that matter) use a word processor or spread sheet program? And OpenOffice.org occupies far more space than GIMP.
- GIMP’s user interface may be out of the ordinary. But to those who have gotten used to this interface, Photoshop’s interface is out of the ordinary. (Believe me, I use GIMP for touching up and preparing all the images you see on this blog. And I find GIMP a lot more intutive than Photoshop). Bottom line is, it is a matter of getting used to.
- Agreed, you can always install GIMP using a simple apt-get install. But what about those users who do not have ready access to Internet (and there are lots of them out there who own a computer but rely on Cybercafes for reading their email and web browsing). There will be no easy recourse for these set of Ubuntu users who wish to install and use GIMP.
Another important possibility is to remove Mono and save a lot of space, as well as legal hassle [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Gnote would fit nicely in Ubuntu 10.04, so there goes the problem of Mono altogether.
In the Ubuntu-devel mailing list, Dave Morley has just made this instructive suggestion advocating gThumb as a substitute for F-spot.
On the whole you could replace f-spot with gthumb and most users simply wouldn’t notice, f-spot does organising no better or worse now, it’s only 2 big advantages I see are uploading to online galleries and timeline view.
Worth paying attention to is the part which says that “Gthumb runs faster than fspot by about 10 second on one folder holding about 69 photos.” We previously remarked on the poor performance of Mono by producing comparable figures (as shown below). █
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Posted in Security, Windows at 7:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Assorted new links about security
• Microsoft kills COFEE download (more here)
According to SFGate, thousands of copies have already been downloaded, so Microsoft’s COFEE software is pretty much public now.
• China warns of a new virus
A PARTICULARLY NASTY computer virus has been discovered in China and the government there is warning that it could spread fast.
Although details of the Worm_Piloyd.B are fairly sketchy at the moment, it is unusual to get a virus warning from China before the rest of the world has caught it.
• Symantec Japan website bamboozled by hacker
Romanian hacker Unu used off-the-shelf tools (Pangolin and sqlmap) to steal a glimpse at the database behind Symantec’s Japanese website. A peek at the Symantec store revealed by the hack appears to show clear-text passwords associated with customer records. Product keys held on a Symantec server in Japan were also exposed by the hack.
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Law, Microsoft, Patents at 1:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A large number of reports on the subject which affects Free software at a legal level
THIS is just a quick rundown through some of the patent news impacting Free software.
Red Bend sued Free software some weeks ago and there is a long article about it in LWN.net. It is available to non-subscribers now.
Even for patentese, this language tends toward the impenetrable. But once one realizes that “reference entries that contain reference that refer to other entries” means “addresses,” it starts to become a little clearer. To your editor’s overtly non-lawyerly, not-legal-advice reading, this claim does appear to describe what Courgette is doing.
The article “The Supreme Court v. Patent Absurdity” has been published by the Wall Street Journal, which includes this factoid:
One direct consequence is that “patent trolls” buy up patents so they can sue innovators. Big technology companies pool their patents to reduce lawsuits. For information technology, the costs of litigating patents may be greater than the economic benefits of patents. Real money is involved: The largest patent-case judgment is for $1.67 billion, being appealed by Abbott Labs in a case brought in the plaintiff-happy federal court in eastern Texas.
Here is perspective on the pharmaceutical industry.
The book ends with the perennial question of “would we have got where we are today without patents?” Dutfield points out that it almost goes without saying both that the pharmaceutical industry is crucially important for human welfare since it produces cures (among other things), and that it is considered to be the most dependent of all industries on patents.
This should remind us of two things that a new institutionalist approach leads us to expect. First, changes in property rights structures can never make winners out of everybody. Second, the differences between the gains for some and the losses for others are bound to be great when the biggest right holders have, as they often do, such a firm grip on the regulatory system to the partial or total exclusion of other holders, users and those representing consumer interests.
The Justice Department (and by inference/extension the USPTO) will not make many fans if it permits access only by the affluent. Groklaw complains that this new PACER survey removes/neglects privacy and the following update shows that anonymous access is not really allowed as long as RECAP is treated as too “naughty”.
NOTICE (8/22/09):The court would like to make CM/ECF filers aware of certian security conce rns relating to a software application called RECAP, which was designed by a group from Princeton University to enable th e sharing of court documents on the Internet. Once a user loads RECAP, documents that he/she subsequently accesses via PA CER are automatically sent to a public Internet repository. Other RECAP/PACER users are then able to see whether document s are available from the Internet repository. RECAP captures District and Bankruptcy Court doucments, but has not yet inc orporated Appellate Court functionality. At this time, RECAP does not appear to provide users with access to restricted o r sealed documents. Please be aware that RECAP is “open-source” software, which can be freely obtained by anyone with Int ernet access and modified for benign or malicious purposes, such as facilitating unauthorized access to restricted or sea led documents. Accordingly, CM/ECF filers are reminded to be diligent about their computer security practices to ensure t hat documents are not inadvertently shared or compromised. The court and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts wil l continue to analyze the implications of RECAP or related-software and advise you of any ongoing or further concerns.
Groklaw remarks that the “US District Court for the District of NJ Notices RECAP” and adds: “I think whoever wrote this notice may not be aware that the federal judiciary switched to Linux for its infrastructure back in 2003, so evidently there is no cause for alarm about the flexibility of open source software. I don’t know how RECAP works, but just speaking in general. Because their system works on Linux, they have many, many options to address security successfully, even if there were valid concerns, and likely that’s one reason the courts chose Linux.”
Here is an attempt to make money out of the Bilski proceedings.
A webcast of the panel discussion will be available for a registration fee of $15 (government/academic/retired FCBA member), $35 (government/academic/retired nonmember), $65 (private practitioner FCBA member), or $105 (private practitioner nonmember). Instructions for accessing the webcast can be found here. Those interested in obtaining group pricing and university law schools interested in free internet participation should contact Elisabeth Reed at reed@fedcirbar.org.
Bilski was also covered here at Patently-O, which looks at “The Value of Patents in a Major Crisis Such as an Influenza Pandemic.” People like Donald Trump are said to be making a fortune out of Swine Flu.
E.D. Texas Magistrate Judge Love has recommended that H&R Block’s advance-tax-refund patents be held invalid for failing to claim patentable subject matter under Bilski. The claims in question are all directed toward either a “computerized system” or “computer-implemented method.” Quoting Nuijten, the court first held that Bilski controls both system and method claims – since a “court should not be ‘overly concerned with pigeonholing subject matter once the court assures itself that some category has been satisfied.’”
The claimed invention involves issuing a cash-advance to income tax filers and then retaining a right to receive payment from the government.
Stupidity at the USPTO is being put to the test:
Journalists who cover Washington know the drill: top bureaucrats can be very hard to get through to, especially when you need to reach them the most.
So when ABA Journal senior writer Terry Carter got nowhere in his recent effort to reach Patent and Trademark Office director David Kappos through spokesman Peter Pappas for a story he was writing, he decided on a characteristically novel approach: on Tuesday he drafted and posted a humorous patent application for a “method to get an interview with USPTO Director David Kappos.” Edward Adams, editor and publisher of the ABA Journal, wrote in this story at the Journal Web site, “We figured the problem was that Carter was not speaking the agency’s language.”
Glyn Moody passes the message that “[Microsoft] filed a patent for sparklines in Excel, ignoring Tufte and demonstrating that the patent system is a deranged circus” and Amazon scores gift-delivery patent, according to Slashdot.
In May, the USPTO rejected Amazon.com’s patent claims (PDF) for its Method and System for Placing a Purchase Order Via a Communications Network (a 1-Click spin-off). At the time, a USPTO Examiner cited Bilski, explaining that elements of CEO Jeff Bezos’ gift-delivery invention ‘may be performed largely within the human mind,’ coming to essentially the same conclusion a NY Post reporter arrived at in 2002. But Amazon’s attorneys have worked their legal wordsmithing magic (PDF), convincing the USPTO that ‘obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient’ is indeed novel and patentable. A Notice of Allowance for the patent was mailed to Amazon on November 17th, just in time for Holiday Season injunction-giving!”
The EFF has found another ugly patent to swat and it is looking for brains.
Patenting podcasting? You’ve got to be kidding. Yet a company called Volomedia just got the Patent Office to grant them such exclusive rights.
EFF and the law firm of Howrey, LLP aren’t willing to just sit by and watch. This patent could threaten the vibrant community of podcasters and millions of podcast listeners. We want to put a stop to it, but we need your help.
Thought-provoking new article at Against Monopoly: “Common Misconceptions about Plagiarism and Patents: A Call for an Independent Inventor Defense”
Defenders of patents commonly say they are against innovators’ ideas being “stolen” or “plagiarized.” This implies that patents simply permit an innovator to sue those who copy his idea. This position betrays either disingenuity or ignorance about patent law. Let me explain.
Under copyright law, someone who independently creates an original work similar to another author’s original work is not liable for copyright infringement, since the independent creation is not a reproduction of the other author’s work. Thus, for example, a copyright defendant can try to show he never had access to the other’s work, as a defense. The reason for this is that the fundamental copyright is, well, a right to copy one’s original creative work. By the nature of creative works that are subject to copyright, it is very unlikely someone would independently create the same novel, say, or painting, as another author. (And if copyright only protected literal copying, it would be much less a problem; but unfortunately it protects a bundle of rights including also the right to make “derivative works”.) But, in the rare case where author 2 independently creates a work very similar to that of author 1, it is not an infringement of author 1′s copyright, since author 2 did not copy anything.
Patent law is different. Very different. Most defenders of IP do not seem to be aware of this difference–one reason they should not be opining in favor of legal regimes they know little about. When patent defenders say that patent abolitionists are in favor of plagiarism and idea theft, they imply that patent law is like copyright law–that it simply prevents people from copying others’ ideas.
Glyn Moody adds:
“How to Fix Capitalism” is an insanely ambitious post that ranges over, well, just about everything concerned with business and all it touches. The following proposals give some hint of its deep wisdom:
# Abolish patents. They have not been proven to speed progress: the evidence seems to be to the contrary. They definitely increase costs, are an inefficient way of funding R & D and allow oligopolists to block competition.
Over in Europe, the following articles are worth a glance:
i. Internet-hosted prior art and proof of publication: UK not bound by EPO level of proof
In a recent hearing concerning a UK patent application, Ranger Services Ltd’s application, BL O/362/09, 17 November 2009, Hearing Officer Lawrence Cullen was faced with a question relating to the status of cited prior art which had been obtained from an internet archive. Rejecting the application before him, which was for a system of using an automatic number plate recognition system to detect cloned vehicle number plates, he considered that the current European Patent Office guidelines [see earlier IPKat post here] would suggest that the cited prior art should be taken into account.
ii. QinetiQ mail virus patent attracts barbs
An anti-virus expert has poured cold water on a patent from British technology firm QinetiQ that supposedly offers a new technique for tackling malicious email attachments.
No company should not be able to patent software in the UK, but Nokia is a problem in that regard (because of Symbian [1, 2]).
The ugly “Community patent” is still trying to rear its ugly head and potentially bring software patents to the whole of Europe. Here is the latest update: “EU Community Patent And UPLS: Will There Be A Political Breakthrough Soon?”
The Intellectual Property Expert Group (ipeg) are feeding hopes in their Blog that the Swedish EU Presidency might be lucky enough to successfully forge some sort of political compromise on the EU Community Patent as well as on the Unified Patent Litigation System (UPLS) later this year.
The “Community patent” is an attempt previously characterised as “harmonisation” by Charlie McCreevy and other cronies, including Microsoft lobbyists.
In relation to copyright, Glyn Moody has just explained what “harmonisation” really is about:
I and many others have noted how changes in copyright law only ever work in one direction: to *increase* copyright’s term and to give greater powers to copyright holders. In effect, it’s a ratchet. But until now, I’ve not seen a good explanation of what’s driving all this (although I had a pretty good idea). The motor behind the ratchet (assuming such mixed metaphors are permitted) is harmonisation:
Simply put, “harmonization” is a concept whereby the intellectual property laws of different countries are made consistent, mostly to facilitate international trade and business. The concept of harmonization is not unusual; almost all the states and territories in this country are signatories to the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a model law in the U.S. that makes consistent (or “harmonizes”) the law of contracts, sales, banking, and secured transactions. This allows firms in one state to reasonably, predictably, and consistently do business with firms in another state.
As Roger Lancefield points out in the comments,”effectively this is legal imperialism.
“It’s hard not to draw parallels with another manifestation of US legal imperialism, the extradition treaty which has destroyed Gary McKinnon’s life.” Remember what Microsoft did to McKinnon. █
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