Summary: Microsoft and its proxies incite regulators against Google
I am hardly a Google user myself, but when it comes to hack jobs I mind a lot. Microsoft with its proxies is trying to incite the government against Google (search) as a last resort in the search battle. There is some news which suggests lobbying win for Microsoft:
Last month, Reuters reported that four of the five FTC commissioners had concluded that Google has used its search market dominance to harm its rivals. Agency investigators circulated a draft memo recommending legal action against Google. Last week, Bloomberg reported that the FTC has delivered “an ultimatum” to Google demanding that the search giant offer a plan to settle the investigation, or face a lawsuit. If no settlement is reached, the FTC will press ahead in the coming days with a vote that will determine whether the commission files a lawsuit. If that happens, the lawsuit would be the most dramatic action taken by the U.S. government against a major technology company since the Department of Justice challenged Microsoft in the 1990s.
“If you don’t think you can win,” writes Pamela Jones, “maybe you should think about whether you really have a case? And leaking threats when you know you don’t think you can win is lame. What’s really going on here?”
Earlier today, the group FairSearch published a blog post outlining potential remedies that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should consider in its antitrust inquiry into Google’s practices. FairSearch is a group of companies that complain to regulators that Google’s superior performance is the product of “anticompetitive” behavior. FairSearch members include Microsoft, Expedia, Hotwire, Foundem, and TripAdvisor.
FairSearch’s post today lists behavioral and structural remedies, along with steps for ensuring implementation of these remedies. We’ve written extensively on remedies proposed by FairSearch, refuting over a dozen of them. Google is a client of my firm, but I do not speak for the company, only for myself.
Nonetheless, I want to address FairSearch’s latest offering, though many are recycled without the slightest improvement.
FairSearch’s proposals are, at points, hopelessly vague. I have to guess at the proposals, to some extent, in order to refute them. As a result, this post is more detailed than the one it refutes.
[...]
Indeed, these flawed remedies demonstrate that Google’s competitors are not interested in competing in the marketplace to win over customers. Instead they want to use the power of government to handicap the strongest of the pack, to the benefit of the weaker competitors. That’s a raw deal for consumers, and a heavy blow against innovation.
Microsoft never cared about innovation. Destruction is the motto. Microsoft does whatever it takes to just eliminate competition. █
The new mass aggregator, however, is an entirely different beast. To begin with, funding sources for mass aggregators include some very successful and respectable organizations, including manufacturing companies such as Apple, eBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, and Sony, as well as academic institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Notre Dame, and other entities such as the World Bank and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Nations such as China, France, South Korea, and Taiwan even have their own mass aggregators to varying degrees.
Moreover, the acquisition appetites and patent supply sources are quite interesting. Mass aggregators may have portfolios that range across vastly different areas of innovation from computers to telecommunications to biomedicine to nanotechnology. In some of the acquisition activity, mass aggregators purchase large chunks, and even the majority, of an operating company’s patents and patent applications. They typically pay cash up front, as well as a share of any future profits generated from asserting the patents against anyone other than the selling manufacturer. Mass aggregators have engaged in other unusual acquisition approaches as well, including purportedly purchasing the rights to all future inventions by researchers at universities in developing countries. Other acquisition approaches purportedly include targeted purchases of patents that are of particular interest to the mass aggregators’ investors.
The types of returns promised to investors and the types of benefits offered to participants are also quite different from garden-variety non-practicing entities, as are some of the tactics used in organizing the entities and in asserting the patents. Finally, the scale itself is simply mind-boggling. Mass aggregators operate on a scale and at a level of sophistication and complexity that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. They have taken the prototype strategies pioneered by a prior generation of non-practicing entities and changed them into some of the cleverest strategies yet seen in the intellectual property rights field.
The goal of this article is to shed some light on mass aggregators. We hope to provide some understanding of the nature of the change, to analyze its economics and implications, and to offer some normative considerations. In the descriptive section, we focus on the oldest and largest of the mass aggregators, Intellectual Ventures, which has gone to great lengths to maintain secrecy. Working from public sources and investing thousands of hours of research, we offer a detailed picture of the entity, tracing through approximately 1300 shell companies and thousands of patents. The section also describes in brief form several other mass aggregators, including ones that are public companies.
These are cartels and they should be made illegal. They inflate prices and deflate innovation. We dealt with the subject before.
There is an article in the BBC titled “Phone patents: An absurd battle“. iophk says it proposes patent trolls as a solution and adds: “I am surprised that Intellectual Ventures was not promoted. That’s one of the biggest if not the biggest” (it is).
I cannot read this article in the UK. Neither can Glyn Moody, who wrote: “wow, this is fun: the #BBC won’t let me access the bbc.com site ‘cos I’m in UK – http://bit.ly/Q5SK2Q ironic much?”
Good ol’ BBC is still serving plutocrats, not taxpayers who fund it obligatorily.
Here is what Groklaw quotes from this article: “One reason boils down to the nature of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, according to Daniel O’Connor, a self-styled anti-trust and internet policy wonk as well as senior director of public policy at the Computer and Communications Industry Association. He says that software is a particularly active area for patents, especially anything to do with telecommunications, semiconductors and 4G data networks. Software patents are also particularly broad and vague, and that makes infringement difficult to avoid. “That creates the conditions for a kind of patent perfect storm,” O’Connor says….
“[M]ost of these patents don’t just make a single claim to a particular intellectual property right – on average each patent makes more like 20 such claims. That means that this collection of 250,000 patents actually describes about five million restrictions on what mobile device makers can do while they design a new model. Realistically an individual may be able to keep five, 10 or maybe 20 restrictions in mind when designing a new feature for a mobile device, but probably not 50 or 500. And five million? Not a chance.”
Back on September tenth we posted a report revealing the fact that Apple had acquired 434 LTE centric patents. One of the original sources of our report stated that Rockstar Bidco, a company that Apple holds the majority stake in, acquired 116 LTE patents from Nortel, giving them a total of 434 LTE patents. It’s now been revealed that Apple had been acquiring even more patents over the summer and the list is extensive.
In a report filed yesterday, Business Insider listed a link to the US Patent Office which linked to a series of patent assignments between Nortel, Rockstar Bidco and Apple. The list totaled up to 1375 patents originating from Nortel, with the vast majority of them being assigned to Apple. Some of the listed patents have yet to be assigned to Apple as shown here and here.
U.S. antitrust authorities are examining whether specialized patent-holding firms—or “trolls” to their detractors—are disrupting competition in high-tech markets, opening a new front in a long-standing Silicon Valley battle.
“There’s a possibility of competitive harm here,” said Joseph Wayland, who served as the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief until last week, when he stepped down to return to private practice. Mr. Wayland said officials are devoting “huge energy, particularly at a senior level” to this and other antitrust issues surrounding patents.
Other reports like this one from Reuterssay that the US-leaning ITC is also taking a look:
The US International Trade Commission will review a judge’s decision which found that Apple did not violate patents owned by Samsung in making the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad.
An administrative law judge at the ITC had said in a preliminary ruling in September that Apple was innocent of violating the patents. The ITC, which could have opted to simply uphold the judge’s decision, said that it would take up the matter. A final decision is expected in January.
US antitrust enforcers are getting mighty interested in patent trolls. The Federal Trade Commission has even taken to calling these lawsuit-happy companies “patent assertion entities,” or PAEs.
“There’s a possibility of competitive harm here,” said Joseph Wayland, who was the head of antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department until last week. Wayland just left the government for private practice, and he told the Wall Street Journal there is “huge energy, particularly at a senior level” being spent on scrutinizing the intersection of patents and antitrust.
The FTC and the Department of Justice announced today they will host a public forum on December 10 to study the issue more closely. The speakers include IP lawyers, law professors specializing in these so-called PAEs, and even officers of high-profile patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures and Round Rock Research LLC. Executives from companies that have been critical of patent-holding companies, such as Cisco and Rackspace, will also be featured.
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are opening informal hearings next month which will look into the question of whether specialised patent-holding firms, also known as “patent trolls” to many, are disrupting competition in technology markets. Concerns that non-practising entities (NPEs) – companies that hold patents but do not make use of them – cause problems in the market have existed for some time. The traditional “troll”, a small company holding a handful of patents, has in recent years been joined by the huge patent-holding corporations who buy up hundreds of patents. The aim of the NPEs is to get licence revenue from companies who they claim are infringing the patents they hold.
They ought to look at the cartels, not just trolls. We’ll make this point again at the end of the night (addressing the USPTO as a whole, not just the ITC). The patent system is as inherently corrupt as the political system, which corporations control at people’s expense and to people’s detriment. █
Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Preparing for the worst here in the UK…
Summary: Using deceiving terms such as “unitary” the patents cartel and lobby put the foundations for monopoly on software everywhere in Europe, essentially such that it is going global
Future perfect? The JURI is out, and Europe waits … – http://bit.ly/10gp8BG looks like the #unitarypatent trick is going through #swpats
Here is what the lawyers in London (pro-software patents) wrote in their preliminary analysis:
Tonight [1900 to 2100 in Strasbourg, which works out at 1800 to 2000 GMT] following a special meeting of the JURI Committee of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Commissioner Barnier is expected to announce a major breakthrough in the long-running saga of the creation of a Unitary European Patent and Unified Patent Court [on both of which this blog weblog has carried countless posts, mainly thanks to the efforts of Annsley]. The announcement will herald agreement between Council and the European Parliament leading to the adoption of new legislation to create the new system by April 2014.
The public ought to make a big mess like when ACTA was being pushed through the system. Glyn Moody saw a follow-up post and wrote: “if true, this will be a disaster of epic proportions…”
If the rumours are true it could mean that, for European Union-based holders of patents, the place of domicile determines applicable national law while for non-EU patentees, in contrast, German national law would apply. If the UPC found itself obliged to apply different national laws in the case of unitary patents — even though that application would be with uniform effect — it appears that litigation might produce quite different results, depending on the domicile of the patentee. This in turn suggest that the product of the past few years’ mammoth effort to produce unitary effect for patents would actually be, er, divergence.
The rumoured final texts thus seems to introduce a new level of complexity and fragmentation which those of us who dreamed of a single patent having single effect across a single market had never previously envisaged. Indeed, the potential for divergent jurisprudence may even be greater than would have been the case if the interference by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) — which the compromise language was seeking to remedy — had been allowed to occur in the first place.
But what about that curious new wording which seeks to avoid using the word “infringement”? Might it mean that UK national law would apply to both infringement and validity of a unitary patent owned by a British-based company such as BT or GSK, Dutch law for Philips’ unitary patents, Swedish law for Ericsson’s, Finnish law for Nokia’s and — for all non-EU companies — German national law?
Over at IDG, Loek Essers finally gives attention to this serious escalation of circumstances. To quote:
The European Parliament’s legal affairs committee welcomed a new proposal in order to create an E.U.-wide patent system during a Monday night meeting in Strasbourg. A majority voted in favor of a compromise that finally creates “an E.U. patent, after over 30 years of attempts, to support E.U. innovation and growth,” the European Parliament said in a news release on Tuesday.
The new compromise text now respects the European Court of Justice’s power to ensure consistent application of E.U. legislation, seems to be compatible with E.U. law and upholds the Parliament’s rights to be involved if there are changes in the patent rules, said Bernard Rapkay, the member of the committee of legal affairs who is responsible for the draft legislation.
They are finding new loopholes by which to help foreign large corporations for the most part. Bad news for all European software developers, irrespective of their development paradigm. Inform peers and family, fight back before it’s too late! █
Years ago, when I was a GNU/Linux newbie, I found LinuxQuestions.org to be the site where I could find out just about anything about GNU/Linux in a rapidly growing on-line community. It’s still going strong so many years later.
Wouldn’t you like the cost of IT to drop 80%? You can have that with GNU/Linux. It is a cooperative project of the world to provide IT at minimal cost and it works for you and not for some supplier converting monopoly into a licence to print money. It’s not magic. If your software is designed to work for you instead of to generate licensing revenue, you have lower costs all around.
It’s that time of year again — when all of the pundits, bloggers, and Max Headroom-like “voices of the future” spout off their thanks for all things tech and nerdy. Not one to jump on every bandwagon that comes along — I wanted to point out the things that the open source and Linux community have to be thankful for.
A few years ago, Brazilian developer Daniel Neis Araujo couldn’t imagine building open source health care equipment that could compete with traditional and respected proprietary solutions. But recent advances in Linux and the open hardware movement have allowed a faster development pace and a lower cost of entry for startups in the telemedicine field, in particular, he said.
The document sent on October 14th 2011 by the Italian National Police to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other national security forces, such as the Carabinieri, Polizia Stradale and Polizia Ferroviaria, reveals the organization of a task-force to control and inhibit the massive demonstration that was going to take place one day after in Rome.
Recently, we’ve been reporting on how Google is aggressively pushing Chrome OS, and the cloud-centric operating system is arriving on machines that are not only low priced, but Google is offering free incentives worth more than the computers running Chrome OS. We covered the arrival of Samsung’s new Chromebook portable computer running Google’s Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249. And now, Acer is out with a new C7 Chromebook that sells for only $199 (seen here). Interestingly, noted open source advocate Simon Phipps, writing for InfoWorld, says he has ditched his MacBook for a Samsung Chromebook.
Ubuntu is known for many things: ease of use, regular updates, widespread community support, and more. One thing it is not known for is gaming. This is changing, however, with Steam heading to Linux in the near future. System76′s new Bonobo Extreme is Ubuntu-powered and aimed at gamers, boasting some impressive hardware and a hefty price tag.
Selling PCs with Linux preinstalled is hard enough. Doing it without paying attention to the latest hardware trends makes it nigh impossible. That’s probably why two major Linux OEMs, ZaReason and System76, have debuted “all-in-one” (AIO) desktop PCs powered by open source operating systems. Will their initiatives pay off?
In a sense, AIO computers — the kind where the monitor and central hardware are integrated into a single case — go back quite a long time. Many of the old, old Macintoshes used this format, as did machines such as the Commodore PET 2001 (which, despite its name, first debuted in 1977). But the contemporary implementation of the all-in-one PC, exemplified by the modern iMac, is a newer idea.
Google recently launched the Samsung Chromebook that for $249 USD features an 11-inch display, a 16GB SSD, a promise of 6.5-hour battery life, and is backed by a Samsung Exynos 5 SoC. The Samsung Exynos 5 packs a 1.7GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 processor with ARM Mali-T604 graphics. With using this new ARM Cortex-A15 chip plus the Samsung Chromebook not being locked down so it can be loaded up with a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or openSUSE, it was a must-buy for carrying out some interesting Cortex-A15 Linux benchmarks. The Exynos 5 Dual in this affordable laptop packs an impressive performance punch.
It may still be a bit early for the ubiquitous end-of-year story looking back at 2012, but even now, it seems safe to say that the “Linux preloaded” trend will surely go down in history as a big part of what has characterized this year in desktop computing.
Meraki builds cloud managed wireless and wired access points as well as providing network acceleration and security capabilities. Meraki’s hardware appliances are based on a hardened Linux operating system and includes a subscription based service for cloud management.
A recently introduced systemd enhancement allows programs to add a unique identifier to log messages sent to systemd’s Journal, which lets it retrieve extra information about the logged event from a message catalogue. Developers could, for example, add some further details and internet links concerning an error message to the information in the catalogue; the information could also explain the log data in a user’s local language if a suitable translation exists.
Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all Torvalds has given the internet.
He’s also started some serious flame wars.
Over the past few years, Torvalds has emerged as one of the most articulate and engaging critics of the technology industry. His funny and plainspoken posts to Google+ routinely generate more comments and attention than most stories on The New York Times — or even Wired.
From an SSD-backed Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU and a 160GB Intel SSD, the XFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems were benchmarked. For reference, the Linux 3.5 kernel was also benchmarked on the same system with the three Linux file-systems. Unfortunately, the Linux 3.6.x kernels failed to properly boot on this particular system so there are only Linux 3.5 and 3.7 Git results.
Oh boy! It’s good to see someone with his eye on the road at the wheel sometimes… We all make the mistake of thinking too locally or not considering consequences of our actions but Linus whips such failings back into shape. Good for him.
Security researchers have discovered what appears to be an experimental Linux rootkit designed to infect its highly select victims during a classic drive-by website attack.
Posted anonymously to Full Disclosure on 13 November by an annoyed website owner, the rootkit has since been confirmed by CrowdStrike and Kaspersky Lab as being distributed to would-be victims via an unusual form of iFrame injection attack.
A new Linux rootkit has emerged and researchers who have analyzed its code and operation say that the malware appears to be a custom-written tool designed to inject iframes into Web sites and drive traffic to malicious sites for drive-by download attacks. The rootkit is designed specifically for 64-bit Linux systems, and while it has some interesting features, it does not appear to be the work of high-level programmer or be meant for use in targeted attacks.
Linux now supports network address translation (NAT) for IPv6. Other new features include server-side support for Google’s TCP Fast Open (TFO) acceleration trick and a tethering driver for the iPhone 5.
Another season, another Linux kernel. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes as kernel developers churn out new releases every two or three months. Within the next few weeks, Linux 3.7, the latest version of the code at the core of most mainstream open source operating systems — on Android phones as well as PCs and servers — will likely see its official release. And unlike some kernel updates, it will introduce a host of new features that end users may want to know about.
We don’t cover Linux kernel development too frequently on The VAR Guy because it’s not something most end users are likely to care about or understand. Unless you’re deeply interested in how your computer works “under the hood” — and kudos to you if you are — chances are you don’t want to read about the latest innovations in Linux memory management or file systems.
The first point release of Wayland 1.0 is now available for those interested in this next-generation display server environment.
Kristian Høgsberg announced the Wayland 1.0.1 release on Monday. It’s been just shy of one month since the release of Wayland 1.0 while today’s update provides some fixes for the recent release that marked the point of API/protocol stability and a guarantee on backwards compatibility with future releases.
Improvements to Twitter and IRC support are the highlights of the latest update to the open source Instantbird instant messaging (IM) client. When using Twitter in Instantbird 1.3, the user’s own description is now displayed above the timeline and can be easily edited. All users mentioned in a Tweet when replying are now included in the reply, making Instantbird work in the same way as the Twitter web site.
Game developer and distributor Valve has ramped up Steam for Linux by adding three more game titles. Steam for Linux was originally released with 24 titles and now the count stands at 27. You can see all the games supported in Linux platform in this page.
The company is also inviting more and more beta testers to test their software and report bugs. Steam is currently in closed beta phase now and only few selected individuals will be able to test it. Despite amazing response of 60,000+ users, Valve is keeping the beta limited and inviting people based on hardware configuration and graphics card on a daily basis.
Today, the always innovative Humble Bundle launched yet another great new project. This time they’ve teamed up with Tim Schafer, whom some may remember as the founder of Double Fine and the creator of their insanely successful Kickstarter campaign (and others may remember him as the creator of several classic adventure games). The project is a twist on the standard Humble Bundle system: instead of paying what you want for a collection of existing games, contributors get to vote on various game ideas from the Double Fine team to decide which ones get prototyped. The whole development process will then be live-streamed, and contributors will be able to download the prototypes at the end. The ideas themselves come from a feverous internal brainstorming process called the Amnesia Fortnight, the secrets of which are being revealed to the public, as best (and most entertainingly) explained in the video:
KING Art and Nordic Games have announced that The Critter Chronicles, the prequel to The Book of Unwritten Tales (BoUT), will be released in December for Linux, PC, and Mac.
The Critter Chronicles is the first chapter in the journey that actually started before the beginning of The Book of Unwritten Tales.
The original game was released initially in 2009, but it was promoted again in July 2012. This is a beautiful tale that allows players to travel back to the very beginning when Nate Bonnett first met his hairy sidekick Critter and the adventurers can assume the role of either character.
The much hyped Gnome’s file manager Nautilus 3.6 has made its way to the upcoming version of Ubuntu, Raring Ringtail. This version was earlier not adopted in Quantal due to many of its controversial changes. The whole desktop was upgraded to Gnome 3.6 while the file manager remained of 3.4 branch. Linux Mint developers on the other hand made their own fork of file manager called Nemo. This is similar to the earlier attitude taken by the developers, i.e. bring their own fork of Gnome as they did for Cinnamon.
With computers and applications becoming more and more smarter everyday, one is coming more close to security breeches and loopholes. Security issues today are more complex and harder to detect than they were five years ago. Developers are becoming more and more aware of this situation and they are finding out way to make computing more secure, fast and relaible.
A new version of the Gnome Desktop, Gnone 3.7.2 is out. This version includes several stability and performance improvements along with bug fixes theta will make the Gnome desktop more stable, secure and reliable. Among the many changes in this release, the most important is the support for remote search providers. Now not only you will be able to search Wikipedia and Google from Gnome, but also will be able to search files, folders and documents from the single Gnome search bar.
For the first time since Linux Mint 11, the development team was able to capitalize on upstream technology which works and fits its goals. After 6 months of incremental development, Linux Mint 14 features an impressive list of improvements, increased stability and a refined desktop experience. We’re very proud of MATE, Cinnamon, MDM and all the components used in this release, and we’re very excited to show you how they all fit together in Linux Mint 14.
Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and engineering services for customers with high-security requirements, today announced that the company has updated CLIP to support RHEL 6.2. The new release will be used by developers leveraging Linux to build appliances or systems with confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability requirements for U.S Intelligence and Department of Defense (DoD) agencies as well as for critical infrastructure and other communities that manage sensitive or classified information. The enhancements to the platform enrich integration features available in previous releases and include adding DCID (Director of Central Intelligence Directive) 6/3 Protection Level 4 (PL4) high-availability and high-integrity requirements support, a custom SELinux policy, and a new build system for generating installable media.
Today, there’s a lot of cloud choices, and at their core, all major cloud platforms can provide the same kind of functionality with a vendor’s personal flavor. But when it comes down to mission-critical business applications that measure effectiveness down to the second, making a cloud choice may be a more difficult task when important variables are in play.
Fedora 18 is still at least two months away from hitting a download mirror near you, but if you have read the articles on pre-stable versions that have been published on this website, you’d know that Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, will be a completely different beast on Fedora 18.
For those curious about the state of Ubuntu 13.04′s development, there is a convenient status page to reflect the overall condition of this forthcoming Ubuntu Linux that is codenamed the Raring Ringtail.
The Ubuntu development team have published a nice status page where you can readily monitor the development of upcoming versions of Ubuntu. From that status page, we learned that around 13% of the proposed work for Raring Ringtail is complete. One of the chief aims of Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, i.e. porting it to embedded and mobile devices is complete. However, only 1% of work is complete for Kubuntu 13.04.
Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical’s six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company’s current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it’s a bit of a rocky ride.
Welcome to the third part of my Xubuntu 12.10 review. The purpose of this set of articles is to take the base Xubuntu installation and show how easily it can be improved to make the best Linux operating system of them all.
In the first part of the Xubuntu 12.10 review I reviewed the base install. In the second part of the Xubuntu 12.10 review I looked at how it is possible to customise all the aspects of the XFCE desktop to make it look the way you want it to look.
For years I’ve been dreaming of a streaming media device that could just be stuck to the back of a television. Since XBMC has been far and away my favorite set-top box software, I’ve closely monitored hardware developments that can run that package. Now I think it’s time to declare that the Raspberry Pi has achieved the base specifications to be branded the XBMC device that rules them all.
Global smartphone shipments are expected to grow 30% to 865 million units in 2013, accounting for 43.9% of total handset shipments in the year, Digitimes Research has estimated.
Sony has launched an indie-focused portal for developers that includes access to the now-out-of-beta PlayStation Mobile software development kit.
The PlayStation Mobile SDK has been available in beta form for quite some time, but Sony has now officially given it the green light and slapped on a $99 (£62) annual usage fee.
After months of working hard to bring Replicant to the next upstream release, we are proud to announce the release of the Replicant 4.0 0001 images. This new release comes with support for both new devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus or the Galaxy S2 and devices that were already there in Replicant 2.3, like the Nexus S and the Galaxy S.
A teardown by iFixit reveals that Google’s flagship phone Nexus 4, manufactured by LG does have an LTE chip in it. It’s a Qualcomm 7-band LTE chip also found on LG’s Optimus phone, which is in some ways identical to this device.
It’s unclear why the phone doesn’t support LTE service despite the presence of the hardware. There can be many wild guesses — one is that the chip is there only due to ease of assembly as it is the same board used in LG Optimus G and LG wants to cut down the cost by using the same assembly for this device.
Google’s release of Android Jelly Bean 4.2 has come at a time when somewhere around 50 manufacturers now support the open source mobile-focused operating system.
Looking across the market there are now thought to be over 500 types of Android device and this of course now includes both tablets and smartphones.
Google eventually plans to roll-out the service on a cross-platform basis with multiple hardware partners, according to reports.
The search giant introduced the first phase of this new technology on YouTube last week, enabling users to Beam content from their Android smartphones to Google TV-connected HDTVs. But this is just the first step along the road to a bespoke open-source wireless streaming client.
Google’s Android mobile software platform, as we know, has caused quite a conflict with Oracle, given Oracle’s failed lawsuit that claimed Java-like Android infringed on Java patents and copyrights. But now, might Oracle and Google, or even just one of them, decide to formally develop an open source implementation of Java especially for Android?
It was appropriate then that several Valley players took part in Silicon Valley Comes To The UK events last week. But Musk was not there to sing their praises, but merely to expand on his general worldview. Interviewed by Number 10 special adviser Rohan Silva, Musk opened up on a number of issues, some he’s touched on in the past, and others he expanded upon more fully.
The Nexus 7 from Google and the iPad mini from Apple are two of the hottest small tablets. Here are both of these capable tablets in a photo spread showing how they compare in size and with popular apps running.
Remember when mobile hardware manufacturers like HTC and Motorola promised to help customers unlock the bootloaders on their Android devices, paving the way to the promised land of rooting, mods, and custom firmware? Here’s a quick update: it’s not going so well.
In the past year, we’ve seen HTC, Motorola, Sony, and others come out in support of unlocking, setting up special websites dedicated to safely open devices for custom ROMs and other “unofficial” uses. But those efforts have been sabotaged at nearly every turn as one flagship phone after another is sealed shut under the mandates of major carriers like Verizon and AT&T.
Music, film, gaming or sports nut? Xperia Lounge has something for everyone, with exclusive content from Sony and our partners added every week – videos, imagery, competitions and VIP offers.
As if it were any surprise, HTC looks to be readying an international version of the recently announced Droid DNA. A tweet from often-accurate @evleaks tells us the 5-inch smartphone will be released as a global edition and will be called the HTC Deluxe.
If the Deluxe name sounds familiar it is because that was one of the code names tossed around in the months leading up to last week’s announcement. Some readers may recall recently hearing the phone tied to rumors of a HTC DLX moniker.
We have heard dual-booting in PCs, Macs and Laptops. The amazing technology allows one to oot into two OSes in a single computer. User has to specify different partitions for the OSes he wants to boot and is provides with options during booting. Dual booting was unknown in tablets and mobile phones until lately. Innovators have come out with PengPod, that will be able to boot Android as well as Linux in a single tablet.
With its little brother having already spilled its guts, it was always going to be interesting to see how the new 9-inch Fire compared. Turns out it owes an awful lot to Samsung.
Powerbook Medic has torn the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 apart for the world to peer inside. It seems Samsung has done well out of the tablet, as it’s supplying—at the very least—the display, RAM, and flash memory. The processor is courtesy of Texas Instruments, though.
It’s a general matter of course in any given year that as Thanksgiving draws ever closer here in the land of stars and stripes, more than a few Linux bloggers begin to wax sentimental about their favorite operating system, often recounting all the many reasons they’re thankful it exists.
It is the start of the season of thankfulness, after all.
Well, perhaps it’s the recent presidential elections or — even more so — perhaps it’s the fact that a sizable part of the country is preoccupied by a desire to divorce Uncle Sam. In any case, this year, the usual pattern doesn’t seem to have happened.
Identity management specialist ForgeRock has launched a 100% open source software stack intended to secure applications and services across enterprise, cloud, social and mobile environments.
Boasting claims of more than 250,000 downloads in less than 24 months, the ForgeRock Open Identity Stack is positioned (in theory) as a community of global companies working to deploy identity management infrastructures more economically via the open model.
After Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, its lack of interest in maintaining OpenSolaris as an open source operating system drove a group of dedicated developers to pick up where Sun left off. The Illumos Foundation has created a new distro that builds off of OpenSolaris, but calling it a form might not exactly be accurate.
The latest release of the RabbitMQ messaging platform, RabbitMQ 3.0, includes plugins that support Web-STOMP, which allows the text-oriented STOMP protocol to run over WebSockets, and MQTT, the machine-to-machine/”Internet of Things” connection protocol.
The Open World Forum is the best place to meet and talk about the present and the future of open source forges, as seen back in 2010 at the first Open Forges Summit, and again in 2011 to talk about interoperability among forges.
Mozilla released its annual report last week, with a PDF available at the bottom of this page, and the organization’s finances are clearly in order as it moves toward the next chapter in its story: the delivery of Firefox OS. It’s become clear that the next frontier for Firefox is on smartphones, especially in emerging markets. Even though the operating system hasn’t arrived in a version for smartphones and tablets just yet, it is available as a prototype module that you can run on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. You can try it here.
Mozilla on Monday announced it has made Firefox for Android available to “millions” of more phones by adding support for ARMv6 processors. While the open source browser has been out for Android 2.2 and up for a while now, it only worked on phones equipped with ARMv7 processors. You can download the latest version now from the Google Play Store.
Back in September Mozilla included a experimental build in its Firefox for Android beta to support more Android devices and called in people to help them test the new beta release. Now, after two months Firefox for Android supports devices running on the older ARMv6 processors. This will mean that the browser will now be available for download in millions of many more devices.
When people evaluate software for their own need and run X vs. Y checks, they always do it from their own perspective, placing their own needs at the forefront. They are of course doing the one sensible thing, but they are wrong. When you test software, you must ask yourselves how many people will be affected by that use?
If the answer is one, then you can proceed with your own evaluation. If the answer is more than one, then the scale changes instantly and completely, and it’s no longer a question what everyone needs or things, it’s the simple of matter what the weakest link in your user pool needs. Let me elaborate.
Acquia is expanding globally in its support of the open-source web content platform, Drupal. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company said the expansion means it is the first Drupal hosting provider offering high-performance hosting on four continents — Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
Kaltura provides a framework for building enterprise level video applications. Developers can peruse a marketplace of “off-the-shelf” video apps, select the type of deployment and delivery, and include features such as sharing, rating, commenting, and integrations with social networks. The open source platform includes hundreds of APIs, and has a global developer community of more than 40,000 members.
GhostBSD is a FreeBSD derivative that aims to make BSDs easier and bring GNOME to BSD users, although LXDE and OpenBox are also available. The third and last release candidate for upcoming 3.0 was recemtly released for final testing.
One month on and the GCC sources are now in a lot better shape. The cause for most of the problems last month was that a new register allocator pass has been brought in to GCC. This pass – LRA or Local Register Allocator – is meant to be simpler, easier to debug, and provide a better job of register allocation. It is still rather new however, which is why there were so many problems last month. A lot of these have been sorted out now, which is good news as the 4.8 branch will be happening soon.
A study is to be jointly conducted by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Trivandrum, and the Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore on the use of free and open source software in e-governance.
The study, set to be completed in 18 months, will cover the states of Kerala, Karnataka, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
I am a technology practitioner and promoter of open source software (OSS). It ismy job to speak about the open source model in order to facilitate its adoption, to discuss its relevance and viability with regards to the strategic and economic needs of our time.
When I began my career, I spent several years working with closed source and proprietary software. It was then that I was first introduced to open source software. At first, it seemed rebellious, but I soon realized it was just the tip of iceberg. I could sense this was a revolutionary idea capable of a paradigm shift, representing deep topics: sustainable innovation, broader collaboration, and sharing of intellectual outcomes.
The participatory ethic of open source software has become so widespread these days that it is migrating into some unexpected places… like musical instruments, tractors and ecological technology.
Are you an academic, scientist, health policy junkie… or just a person who goes to see your doctor every now and then? Well, listen up: a new project by Fred Trotter and Not Only Development was recently granted protection under the Freedom of Information Act and met it’s crowdfunding effort on MedStartr to move ahead with plans to generate an open data set that promises to alter the healthcare landscape and have drastic implications on how we navigate it.
Wikidata is one of the biggest technical overhauls of Wikipedia in its history and the ripples of change will reach far beyond its own shores. Dr Karl Beecher investigates…
You know your programming language is a hit when it becomes the subject of a children’s book — or, at least, a book written for kids. Python, the popular open source programming platform, can now claim that title, with the recent release by No Starch Press of Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming. Will the book assure your kid’s success as the next prodigy of the computer world?
While the LLVM compiler infrastructure is primarily developed around Subversion, a poll was recently conducted that found LLVM developers overwhelmingly prefer Git over SVN for version control.
Secret trials and withholding evidence are reminiscent of “repressive regimes and undemocratic societies”, the legal profession warns in a letter opposing the government’s justice and security bill.
Ken Clarke’s plans will erode core principles of justice and “fatally undermine the courtroom as an independent and objective forum”, according to the organisations representing solicitors and barristers. The UK’s international reputation for “fair justice” will be significantly damaged, they say.
Nobody believes more fervently than the Mail in the importance of protecting members of the security services who risk their lives for our country.
Nor is anyone more appalled to see terrorist suspects granted huge
compensation payments, agreed out of court because the Government believes contesting their claims in public would put witnesses or their contacts in danger.
But as this paper has passionately argued, security considerations can be no justification for the draconian clampdown on open court hearings proposed in a Bill now going through the Lords.
The folks at Denver’s ABC-affiliated 7News last night ran a story about the David Petraeus sex scandal, his “mistress,” Paula Broadwell, and her biography of Patraeus, All In.
Except instead of pulling an actual copy of the book cover, somebody just ran a Google search and pulled in the first thing they found. Which, unfortunately for 7News, was an altered copy of the book cover.
It’s a well known fact that many people mistake Google’s image search for a license-free stock photo repository. Of course, many people are unaware (or simply uninterested) in the nuances of copyright law, making liberal borrowing of images the norm, rather than the exception.
On the other hand, members of industries that rely on the protection of copyright laws shouldn’t have to be reminded that “running an image search” is not even in the same neighborhood as “properly sourcing a photo.” This distinction is even more important if you’re in a business that relies on integrity, along with various IP laws. Having a staffer just grab an image from “The Internet” for use during a news broadcast could, at the very least, put you in the situation of having to pay up and apologize publicly for using someone else’s photo without permission. At worst, you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
David Cameron has axed standard assessments used to gauge how policies affect different social groups as part of a drive to get rid of the “bureaucratic rubbish” that gets in the way of British business.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini Will Retire This May After 40 Year TenureAt this point, there aren’t that many people who’ve worked at Intel as long as CEO Paul Otellini has. But after 40 years at the 45-year old chip maker—the last eight of them as CEO—he’s hanging up his stirrups this May. His timing couldn’t be better.
Paul Otellini this week resigned his position as CEO of Intel as I’m sure you’ve already heard or read. Analysts and pundits are weighing-in on the matter, generally attributing Otellini’s failure to Intel’s late and flawed effort to gain traction in the mobile processor space. While I tend to agree with this assessment, it doesn’t go far enough to explain Otellini’s fall, which is not only his fault but also the fault of Intel’s board of directors. Yes, Otellini was forced out by the board, but the better action would have been for the board to have fired itself, too.
Living in areas of high air pollution can lead to decreased cognitive function in older adults, according to new research presented in San Diego at The Gerontological Society of America’s (GSA) 65th Annual Scientific Meeting.
This finding is based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Health and Retirement Study. The analysis was conducted by Jennifer Ailshire, PhD, a National Institute on Aging postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Biodemography and Population Health and the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California.
THE RED Cross was nowhere to be found after Hurricane Sandy hit on October 29 and New Yorkers most needed the best-known private humanitarian and disaster relief organization.
Republicans have accused her of making misleading statements by referring to the assault as a “spontaneous” demonstration by extremists. Some have suggested she used the terminology she did for political reasons.
This argument seems persuasive enough to me. Its soundness, however, depends on the validity of that estimate: that collateral damage ranges from seven per cent to 15 per cent, and that that US military authorities really are seriously attempting to minimise civilian casualties. I would like to know a little more about the figures, though: how do we actually know that “these strikes have killed 1,618 to 2,769 combatants, about 153 to 192 civilians and another 130 to 268 persons whose identities were unknown”? Who says that so many of those killed were in fact combatants?
A few months ago, MuckRock and the EFF teamed up to start a drone watch effort, in which they send Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) — or the local equivalent — requests to local governments and police departments, seeking to find out information on local law enforcement using drones. At last count, over 200 such requests have been made. You can track them here. As you might imagine, they’re getting very varied responses, with some saying that there are no responsive documents. In many cases, it’s likely that this is true.
Later this week will see the start of a legal action against police chiefs who have been accused of attempting to hide away their embarrassing secrets.
Eight women who say that they were duped into having long-term relationships with undercover police officers are suing police chiefs. Two other women and one man have also launched a similar legal action.
In a new report, “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” they outline concerns that these Killer Robots would lack the human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians. Also the obstacles to holding anyone accountable for harm caused by the weapons would weaken the law’s power to deter future violations.
Steve Goose, Arms Division director at Human Rights Watch, said. “Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield would take technology too far. Human control of robotic warfare is essential to minimizing civilian deaths and injuries.”
In the summer of 2011, Cameron Munter, the US ambassador to Pakistan, met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington and asked her to intercede with the White House to give him greater control over the CIA’s use of drones along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and to let him speak openly to the Pakistani people – who viewed drone warfare as a gross violation of national sovereignty – about the rationale for the strikes.
MPs are to conduct an inquiry into Britain’s deployment of drones to target militants.
Scrutiny of the use of the unmanned weapons could shed light on the “secret war” being waged remotely by the US against terror suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, it is thought.
A MAN has told judges that he heard his friend screaming on a daily basis as he was being abused in police custody.
He was testifying in the trial of two National Security Agency (NSA) officers accused of causing the death of businessman Abdulkarim Fakhrawi, 49, in April last year.
I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago. The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public.
François Hollande has slammed the door on the exploitation of France’s big oil and shale gas deposits using “hydraulic fracking”, risking further tensions with business leaders anxious not to lose access to what they see as a potentially vital energy asset.
Mr Hollande said he had ordered the rejection of seven applications to open up the country’s shale deposits, citing “the heavy risk to health and the environment” of fracking, which injects water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into rock to release oil and gas.
There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement. It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life.
In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did. And yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice on the nightly news. Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York. There, a loose network of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and petitions.
Americans always feel charitable around the holiday season, giving some $300 billion to a diverse array of charities in 2011 alone. Now there is new way Americans can help their neighbors in need, by purchasing and forgiving their debt.
This is the idea behind the “Rolling Jubilee” being organized by “Strike Debt”, an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since November 15, 2012, they have raised over $350,000, enough to abolish over $7 million in debt.
The only real crises is one of a failing economy and growing economic inequality in which only the needs of the few are served, and also one of lack of political desire or will to solve these real problems. MMT policies can help to bring an end to the first economic crisis; but not if progressives, and others continue to believe in false ideas about fiscal sustainability and responsibility, and the similarity of their Government to a household. To begin to solve our problems, we need to reject the neoliberal narrative and embrace the MMT narrative about the meaning of fiscal responsibility. That will lead us to the political action we need to solve the political crisis and eventually toward fiscal policies that achieve public purpose and away from policies that prolong economic stagnation and the ravages of austerity.
And yet, we are now supposed to believe that many things that went wrong leading up to the financial crisis were caused by a handful of junior bankers and traders supposedly acting on their own. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and the Securities and Exchange Commission continue to blame Fabrice Tourre, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, for the botched manufacturing and selling of the Abacus 2007-AC1 synthetic collateralized debt obligation.
oday, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet dessert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production.
But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.
The numbers reveal the deadening effects of inequality in our country, and confirm that tax avoidance, rather than a lack of middle-class initiative, is the cause.
The Gates Foundation continues to fund Teach For America, Stand For Children, The Media Bullpen, the National Council for Teacher Quality, Teach Plus, The New Teacher Project, and literally scores of other groups which carry on campaigns to undermine due process for teachers, and actively lobby for coercive legislation that forces public schools to use faulty test scores for the purposes of teacher evaluation, against the best judgment of administrators and academic experts.
“Security is a function of the resources your adversary is willing to commit,” said Julian Sanchez, a policy expert with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
“If you’ve been flagged as a high-priority target by the NSA [National Security Agency] and are under active observation,” Sanchez said, “then no, you can probably never have ‘total confidence’ that your communications won’t be traced.”
But for the rest of us, it’s definitely a possibility. With the right tools, some vigilance and a little bit of Web savvy, you, too, can best General Petraeus, Hamas, al-Qaida and the Taliban with communiqués so virtually untraceable that they would make James Bond blush.
Americans are still reeling from the cacophony of secret money and negative ads that was the 2012 election. Much of the money spent on the congressional and presidential campaigns came from undisclosed sources, underscoring the continued need to fight for reforms to promote transparency in elections.
The Hungarian government was forced to awkwardly rebuff some rare international praise this weekend, following some approving comments about the country on Friday by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. According to a report from Belarusian state news agency Belta entitled “Lukashenko: Western society changes views on democracy and market economy”, the Belarusian president – who has often been dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” – said the following during the appointment of new Belarusian envoys to Hungary and France:
“Hungary used to be a socialist country. We used to be good friends with them. We used to have very close relations. After they became fed up with ‘democracy’ and market economy… they got sober.”
Lukashenko then went on to say that Belarus needs to build relations with Hungary, as it “cannot lose this country.”
Quite a week for random governmental retractions. Back in February, when we first warned about the upcoming “World Conference on International Telecommunications” (WCIT) meeting of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU), we noted that the thing to be most afraid of was countries like Russia and China using the process to take over control of aspects of the internet, in part to allow greater control for the sake of censorship, but also to set up questionable “tariffs” on internet traffic, designed to basically divert money to state owned or “closely associated” telcos. While much of the focus over the past few months was on the EU telcos proposal, you had to know that even worse was coming.
A year and a half ago, we wrote about a lawsuit from a lawyer in Texas, John Gibson, who is an expert in workers’ comp issues in the state. He — quite reasonably — set up a blog at the URL TexasWorkersCompLaw.com. Shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Wrong. It seems that Texas has a law that you can’t use the words “Texas” and “Workers’ Comp” together. Seriously. The law explicitly says that anyone advertising Texas Workers’ Comp law help “may not knowingly use or cause to be used… any term using both ‘Texas’ and ‘Workers’ Compensation’ or any term using both ‘Texas’ and ‘Workers’ Comp’;”
WSJ: Google Planted Cookies on iPhones Without Anyone’s Permission (Updated)A report from the Wall Street Journal suggests that Google has been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of Safari users by installing cookies that could track the browsing habits of people—even if they thought they had blocked them.
Throw Away All Your Electronics Because They’re All Turning Into NarcsWe already know that Microsoft’s been looking at ways to turn Kinect into a snitch, but now, Big Brother is taking his talents to the nation’s students with a shiny new line of merciless, whistle-blowing e-books.
The FBI gained access to Broadwell’s anonymous e-mail account. Inside, they found evidence that Broadwell and Petraeus had exchanged racy messages by storing them in Gmail’s “drafts” folder.
[...]
To conceal her identity, Broadwell avoided accessing the account from her home Internet account. Instead, she accessed it from publicly available WiFi connections.
Yet these steps proved insufficient to hide her identity. A source told NBC that it “took agents a while to figure out the source. They did that by finding out where the messages were sent from—which cities, which Wi-Fi locations in hotels.
This week we’ve all read how General Petraeus was forced out of his position because the FBI was able to read his emails. I’ll leave the moral question about affairs for you to determine on your own, however, from a technology perspective, he did many things wrong.
Back in September, we wrote about how Senator Patrick Leahy had introduced a really good bill for ECPA reform. ECPA (the Electronic Communications Privacy Act) is an incredibly outdated bill concerning (as it says) the privacy of electronic messages. It was written in a time (the mid-1980s) before everyone had email, let alone everyone used web-based, cloud-stored email. And thus, it has weird provisions, such as considering that messages stored on a server for more than 180 days are “abandonded” and thus subject to very little privacy protections. And that’s just one of many, many problems with ECPA, which treats all kinds of messages differently.
At least two activists died in custody before or during China’s Communist Party congress and tens of thousands had their movements restricted, rights groups said Monday.
The action was part of the government’s “maintenance stability” campaign aimed at preventing any sign of unrest during the party gathering in Beijing, which ended last week, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) said.
The congress ushered in a once-a-decade leadership change, with President Hu Jintao stepping down from his top party post to make way for Xi Jinping, who is due to be named state president in March.
We’ve pointed out that while we’re told that intellectual property is supposed to be about the incentive to create, the reality is that it tends to be a protectionist tool to attack the competition. If you want to see an amazing example of this and how some companies will use any and all possible IP claims, look no further than the ongoing legal battle between the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the International Securities Exchange. Now, you might think that financial markets wouldn’t need “intellectual property protection” in order to incentivize their creation and continued innovation. And you’d be right. But, if you wanted to use those tools to annoy the hell out of competitors, well, you’ve stepped up to the right window.
Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.
Very soon the six strikes anti-piracy program will kick off in the United States but the RIAA isn’t just sitting back and presuming that it will be an anti-piracy cure-all. Since early November the recording industry group has massively upped the number of DMCA notices it issues to make content harder to find. From an average of between 200,000 and 240,000 URL requests sent every week to Google, the RIAA has just posted 463,000 and 666,000 in successive weeks.
Back in October, we noted that in the latest triennial DMCA exemption review, the Copyright Office/Librarian of Congress refused to say it was legal for you to rip your own legally purchased DVDs so that you could watch them on a computer or tablet. That seems fairly ridiculous, especially given that similarly ripping your CDs is recognized as legal. Rep. Darrell Issa has apparently recognized how silly this and is planning a bill to fix the Copyright Office’s mistake.
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for DRM in my heart, mostly because it makes me laugh. If you think about it, it’s generally rather funny in its uselessness. Pirates don’t care about it as they simply route around any DRM. Customers can certainly be annoyed, but they always end up with the same tools the pirates use to break the DRM on their purchased products. There’s a question of legality in doing so, obviously, but generally nobody really seems to care all that much and software developers just end up in a DRM arms race against nobody, which is inherently funny. All the while, we get wonderful gems like Ubisoft’s vuvuzela DRM, which was hysterical. Now, don’t get me wrong, DRM sucks, but upon reading stories about its effects my range of emotions tends to be anywhere between annoyance and raucous laughter.
Neelie Kroes has emerged as perhaps the most Net-savvy politician in the European Commission, with her repeated calls for a new approach to copyright in Europe that takes cognizance of the shift to a digital world. That’s one measure of how mainstream the idea has become. Another is the fact that even copyright hardliners like Michel Barnier, the Commissioner responsible for the Internal Market in Europe, are starting to frame the discussion in a similar way.
The Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives has issued an extremely interesting (though rather clumsily written and clumsily titled) Report on “Three Myths About Copyright Law, and Where to Start to Fix it.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who has been one of the few leaders in Congress when it comes to pushing for real copyright reform and pushing back against the bad proposals of Hollywood, is apparently looking to use Reddit to crowdsource a new bill concerning internet freedom. Earlier this year, we noted that Lofgren had introduced two good bills — one on ECPA reform (pushing for more privacy for your communications) and one called the Global Internet Freedom Act to create a task force designed to ensure internet freedom. It will be interesting to see how well this works.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is taking to the social news website Reddit on Monday to crowd source ideas for legislation that would provide new protections for websites accused of copyright theft.
Lofgren wants to craft a bill that would stop the government from shutting down a website accused of copyright violations until the owners are given notice and a chance to defend themselves.
In this bold era of copyright trolling, calmly (ir)rational takedown bots, baseless legal threats and ridiculous statutory damages, it’s a true rarity to see a copyright holder deal with infringement, especially non-commercial infringement, with a reaction that’s actually in line with the “crime” committed.
A few years ago, people always referred to the Beatles as the biggest holdouts in terms of releasing their music for sale as MP3s online (mainly iTunes). However, the Beatles finally came around in November of 2010. After that, people started putting together lists of who was left and AC/DC and Kid Rock seemed to top most of those lists.
In 2009, I attended Midem for the first time. It’s an event that the music industry has put on for decades. Over the past few years, they’ve really embraced the idea that the music industry needs to adapt and modernize and have continuously brought in a stream of speakers and participants showing that there are ways for the industry to thrive. In 2009, they invited me to present a case study on Trent Reznor, which remains one of the most popular presentations I’ve ever given. Four years later I still get at least an email a week about it, and sometimes more.
While there’s been plenty of attention paid over the weekend to the fact that the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus of House Republicans, pulled its report on copyright reform after some entertainment industry lobbyists hit the phones/emails late Friday/early Saturday (and, no, it wasn’t directly to RSC, for the most part, but to “friendly” members asking them to express their “displeasure” with the report to the RSC leadership). But we shouldn’t let that distract from the simple fact that the report was brilliant — perhaps the most insightful and thoughtful piece of scholarship on copyright to come out of a government body in decades. You can still read the whole thing as uploaded to Archive.org.
As you likely know by now, the Republican Study Committee published a briefing paper critical of copyright, but then later pulled it down claiming the memo had not received adequate review. Some have suggested that IP-industry pressure may have led to the reversal. I hope we will find out in due time whether the paper was indeed reviewed and approved (as I suspect it was), and why it was removed. That said, I think what this take-down likely shows is a generational gap between the old, captured, and pro-business parts of the Republican Party and its pro-market and pro-dynamism future.
I also hope that this dust-up sparks a debate within the “right” about our bloated copyright system, and so it’s propitious that in a couple of weeks the Mercatus Center will be publishing a new book I’ve edited making the case that libertarians and conservatives should be skeptical of our current copyright system. It’s called Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess, and it is not a moral case for or against copyright; it is a pragmatic look at the excesses of the present copyright regime and of proposals to further expand it. The book features:
Jared Leto is perhaps best known to the general public for his work as a film actor, most notably in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). However, in recent years he has devoted his attention to the world of music, as the lead singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars.
Artifact, directed by Leto himself, under the pseudonym Bartholomew Cubbins (of Dr. Seuss fame), revolves around major record label EMI’s decision to sue the band for $30 million in August 2008. The film was screened November 8 as part of the New York City documentary festival DOC NYC and previously, in September, at the Toronto film festival.
Apple dropped from iTunes the erotic novel, The Proof of the Honey, saying it is because of the cover.
Repeated acts of censorship are an additional reason to condemn iTunes, but not the only one. Even if there were no censorship, you ought to refuse to buy from iTunes because it tramples the rights of its own users.
There is nothing too provocative in this cover, which can be seen here. It says:
A publisher has claimed that Apple has removed Salwa Al Neimi’s erotic novel The Proof of the Honey from the iTunes store because its cover – which features part of a woman’s naked back and bottom – is “inappropriate”.
So Apple is not just against sex but also against banal photos of the human body (not genitalia). █
Windows Phone 8 devices have been available since the beginning of the month and users are starting to report early issues across HTC and Nokia handsets. In a thread over at WPCentral with 143 replies, a variety of HTC 8X users report that handsets randomly reboot while in use. A thread on Microsoft’s own support forums has also gained 50 replies complaining about the issues. The Verge can confirm that an 8X we are testing has rebooted on more than one occasion.
What a disaster. What is also a disaster is this other “8″:
Steve, both of you, my Little Woman is just an ordinary user of PCs. She runs few applications, does a lot of web-browsing but takes pictures of everything using smart phone, digital camera and web-cam: moonrise, houses, children, relatives, friends… She accumulates thousands of pictures per annum and has ~20K so far on her PC. You can bet she would tolerate no inflexibility in her file-manager. Fortunately she uses Debian GNU/Linux with XFCE4 and she can have as many windows as she wants open to her file-system as she sorts things out, categorizes them, edits them and inserts them in documents, e-mails, and social websites. File-management has been one of the few things that every user of a PC since the 1980s has appreciated. Who are you to limit what a user can do with a PC out of the box? Who are you to force on the world a crippled OS limiting what people can do with their files?
I have nothing against Microsoft. I happen to think that Windows 7 is a good product and that Windows 8 is a misguided one. I derived these conclusions from first principles of human–computer interaction theory and from watching users in our new research. One doesn’t have to hate or love a company in order to analyze its UI designs.
How do I hate thee Windows 8? Let me count the ways.
The latter link is SJVN’s review of Vista 8, the platform which Microsoft is failing to sell. Jakob Nielsen is a usability expert and he too slammed Vista 8. It will be remembered as a massive blunder. Now, let’s see what Apple is up to… █
Posted in Patents at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Selfishness defined
Summary: Patent (and copyright) news of interest and a few remarks on those
Software patents and patent trolls who use them are of great interest to us, so this news about a troll losing its case got our attention and the attention of others who write:
It’s always slightly amusing to watch extreme patent aggressors get hoisted by their own petard and lose a patent lawsuit. Medical device maker, Medtronic, is somewhat famous for its aggressive pursuit of patent infringement claims against others. In one case, a few years ago, a judge overturned a ruling that Medtronic had actually won and then scolded the company’s lawyers, noting that their “conduct was in disregard for the duty of candor, reflecting an attitude of ‘what can I get away with?’”
It has become its own genre of legal writing: angry judges denouncing plaintiffs in file-sharing lawsuits for abusing the legal system. Judges in New York, Florida, and Illinois have all handed down decisions excoriating the tactics of peer-to-peer plaintiffs. The latest addition to the genre comes from Massachusetts federal Judge Leo Sorokin.
The plaintiffs in the case are publishers of pornographic masterpieces like Anal Cum Swappers 2. Sorokin notes that one of the plaintiffs, Patrick Collins, Inc, has filed “John Doe” lawsuits against at least 11,570 defendants. Yet the firm hasn’t converted any of those “John Does” into named defendants at this point—and that’s the first step toward actual litigation.
While copyright trolling cases keep popping up, it’s become quite impressive how many courts are dumping such cases often while slamming the trolls’ strategy. It’s now happened again. A judge in Massachusetts has called out a troll for its “lack of interest in actually litigating.” The case involves porn company Patrick Collins, Inc., which has been involved in a ton of these trolling cases — including some of those linked above — along with another company, Discount Video Center, represented by the same lawyer.
The practice of trolling with software patents sure is spreading to copyrights. We saw some examples before.
Speaking of software patents, watch how they are being used to impede development of medical solutions:
Pattern recognition software company Parascript LLC has received two U.S. patents for its AccuDetect software, which is used to analyze mammograms for suspicious lesions that could indicate breast cancer.
Longmont-based Parascript developed the computer-aided detection software to analyze digital mammography images. The software can identify suspicious areas for possible soft-tissue densities and calcifications, the company said in a press statement.
See, this is something I have great trouble with. First, it is a case of software patents, which is a broad thing preventing many implementations on similar ideas, which are abstract anyway. Secondly, rather than share knowledge on how to save life they simply hoard another monopoly, hoping to have exclusive rights over cancer treatment. This is not the spirit in which I earned my doctorate in Medical Biophysics. If they acquired skills at something, then they can offer services around those. Their implementation is already covered by copyrights, so why seek patent monopolies? █
Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Lawyers in government against citizens’ will
Summary: Urgent call to contact politicians regarding the Unitary Patent and its consequences; reminder of the reality of lawyers’ influence
NOW that it’s almost 3 PM (CET) it’s probably a good time to address a very important subject. Central Europe is currently not allowing software patents, but large corporations are trying to change that. This impacts me professionally and it impacts many others.
Richard Stallman, the father of Free (as in freedom) software, warned about allowing Europe to give a go-ahead to software patents, saying it would eliminate the current advantage European developers have over their counterparts across the Atlantic. He also suggested eliminating litigation over software patents in the US, as covered by a site he helped fund (through the FSF):
Another approach to ending the problems of software patents would be a law saying, as Richard Stallman puts it, “that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement.”
Speaking of events about software patents, here is one. On Friday there was this conference:
Preview of Our “Solutions to the Software Patent Problem” Conference
On Friday, we’re having our big academic conference of the semester, “Solutions to the Software Patent Problem.” At the conference, experts will propose their ideas of how to fix software patents. Ultimately, we hope there will be enough enthusiasm among the participants to coalesce around one or more proposals and see if we can actually make progress.
In preparation for the conference, we held a “preview” for the students so that they would understand the conference background better. Without previews like this, students often don’t get as much out of the conference because so much of the discussion goes over their heads. Colleen Chien was supposed to do the preview but she had a major conflict, so I stepped in. Below, I’ve included my talk notes. If you’re really interested, I’ve also posted the audio from the talk. I hope to see you on Friday!
I’m so happy to tell you that tomorrow’s conference on what to do about software patents, Solutions to the Software Patents Problem, at the Santa Clara Law’s High Tech Law Institute will be live streamed for those of us who can’t make it in person.
I confess I begged for this, because I know a lot of you are seriously interested in this topic but can’t make it there. So thank you Santa Clara Law. Here’s where you go tomorrow, and it runs all day from 8:50 am to 5:30 pm Pacific time, minus one talk at 9 AM.
To be fair, it was not just a parade of lawyers. This one particular event had notable speakers who are against patents, so unlike some conferences, it was not just law people speaking among themselves. Here is TechDirt:
Patent Office, Perhaps Forgetting What Year It Is, Locks Down Mobile App Development Platforms
I’m spending today at a conference at Santa Clara University’s Law school on Solutions to the Software Patent Problem. It seems only fitting that as this is happening, I’ve been alerted to a completely ridiculous new patent: Appsbar has put out a press release gleefully announcing that it’s been granted a patent on offering a “create your own mobile app” development platform. Stunningly, the patent in question, 8,261,231, was just applied for in February of this year. I’m at a loss as to how a competent patent examiner could possibly think that a mobile app development platform is somehow new or non-obvious in this day and age.
There is more news about the expansion of the patent system to Silicon Valley — something that ought to be criticised. Rather than shrink the system that issues far too many patents, those in charge let it grow further.
John Duffy is a professor at Virginia Law School; prior to that, he was a research professor at George Washington University Law School. Duffy was identified as one of the 25 most influential people in the field of intellectual property by The American Lawyer. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics.
The previous contributor, Andrew Chin, is also a law professor and he writes about his case for keeping abstract patents:
Much criticism of software patents is rightly aimed at the use of abstract claim language to cover a wider range of technology than the patentee invented and disclosed. Mark Lemley, for example, highlights “functional” language in claims as particularly problematic, and proposes in this opinion series that a claimed function be limited to the disclosed “program and ones like it.”
[...]
So the utilities of Bilski’s claimed methods are not amenable to one resource-specific causal account, but many. Bilski’s methods perform their hedging functions whether the market participants’ option values are calculated on my office desktop PC or on the London Science Museum’s Difference Engine, and whether their transactions are completed via telephone or website. A patent examiner could simply cite such an observation in rejecting Bilski’s claims as unpatentable subject matter.
A key advantage of my proposed “concrete causation” standard is its consistency with Supreme Court precedents, which allows the Federal Circuit to introduce it without need for legislation. The universal applicability of this approach conforms to our treaty obligations (to make patents available without discrimination as to the field of technology), suggesting it could become an international norm. The approach also upholds what I’ve identified elsewhere as the patent system’s metaphysical commitment to scientific realism.
By design, this proposal explicitly acknowledges that all of the “useful Arts” confront the common problem of having limited resources. This necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. The patent system exists for those working to do more with less, not for those seeking to corner the market on such efforts through abstract claim drafting.
In Europe too we are left to deal with “legal” folks, whose interests lie not in advancing knowledge but in making a lot of money from it, as if the latter somehow takes priority over the former. April asks people to fight back against the bureaucrats by informing them:
The European Parliament just announced an exceptional meeting of the legal affairs (JURI) committee on Monday November 19th, 2012 at 7pm for the only purpose of discussing the unitary patent package. This new unexpected event in the unitary patent saga is a concern. There is an urgent need to get in touch with the MEPs to let them know about the threats of the unitary patent.
We must really ensure that software patents are kept out of Europe, including the loopholes that let Finnish company Tuxera put a patent tax on Linux and Android. Carla Schroder wrote about it the other day:
Microsoft’s creaky old FAT filesystems, FAT16 and FAT32, have long been the de facto standard filesystems for Flash storage devices. They enable portability because FAT is supported on all major operating systems, and they don’t have access controls so there are no permissions hassles– just plug in your device and use it. But despite FAT’s age and ubiquity, Microsoft successfully enforced its FAT patents against TomTom in 2009. TomTom agreed to drop FAT32 support from their products, several of which were built on Linux. Microsoft has also gone after Android vendors, such as Motorola, who use FAT.
The legal landscape, as always, is bizarre. Linux can support FAT32 without paying royalties because of an inane technicality: long and short filenames. My fellow old codgers recall the 8.3 DOS filename convention: filenames could be no more than 8 characters long with a 3-character extension. This collided with grownup filesystems that supported longer filenames, which FAT truncated. And that is why something like nicelongfilename.txt would be shortened to nicelo~1.txt.
[...]
Linux users have options, sort of. Tuxera sells a good exFAT driver, but only to OEMs, such as Android vendors. There is a free exfat driver, fuse-exfat, and it is included in several distros. This is built on fuse, filesystem in userspace. I’ve tested it a bit without problems, but the developers do not have access to any specifications and it’s still young, so it has some rough edges. I would not rely on it for syncing a Linux PC with devices that use exFAT, like cameras and smartphones.
There is prior art there, as Linus Torvalds revealedsome months ago. Those patents are essentially bunk. █
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