01.04.13
Posted in Apple, Courtroom, GNU/Linux, Google at 4:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: An overview of recent news about Android cases and a reminder of the anti-Korea bias in north American press
Android is developed by an American (US) company, but the lion’s share of Android devices come from east Asia. By creating factories in the US, Apple and Samsung compete over the perception of being “more American” (made or assembled in USA). The corporate press, channels like CNN for example, does an Apple for dummies type of routine when it covers anti-Android lawsuits. It does not focus on trial misconduct [1, 2] for example. Forbes describes Apple as a victim:
Apple is perhaps the most talked about company in the world, online. Now, thanks to Apple’s litigation strategy, Samsung is the second most talked about. Here is a small thread of evidence.
The US is, as one might expect, hostile towards Korean companies if their rivals are largely US-based brands. Pamela Jones is the exception and she writes:
Judge Lucy Koh, the presiding judge in the Apple v. Samsung litigations, warned [PDF] the parties that she would ignore any arguments in their attachments to their post-trial motions that were new and therefore a backdoor way of bypassing the page limits she set for them, writing that “Any argument that is not explicitly articulated within the briefing page limits will be disregarded. Any supporting documentation shall be for corroboration purposes solely and shall not be used as a vehicle for circumventing the Court’s page limits.”
It would not be racist to say that Koh’s ethnicity may make her less likely to be Korea-hostile (as many US judges are). Recall what Europe too does to the Korean giant along with the ITC. Here is the ITC in action. The private US press — that which billionaires literally own — covered it a lot to make Apple, a common advertiser and ally, look good. Smaller news sites mention Apple setbacks; contrariwise, bad news for Samsung is what they fancy covering at CBS. To quote: “Samsung has dropped its bid to have Apple products that relate to its ongoing court cases against the company withdrawn from sale in Europe.”
And what about Apple? Remember who started it all and repeatedly sought bans. Watch this pro-Apple site whining about Apple not getting a trademark on “launchpad” (like Canonical):
On December 13, 2012, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a notice sent to Apple that basically denies them the rights to “Launchpad.” This is Apple’s second attempt at convincing the government agency of approving this trademark.
Canonical has had Launchpad for years. This just shows an ugly side of Apple, that’s all. The company also sought patents on shapes — a territory which in an article by Dennis Crouch he describes as follows: “laws of design patents; design patent application preparation and prosecution; design patent enforcement; tests of design patent validity; and design patent remedies.”
These patents are vague enough to augment copyright and they are very controversial, too. Remember the rounded rectangle monopoly of Apple? Apple’s cases are just very weak.
Recently we wrote about Apple and MPEG-LA. Watch this new article and remember that Apple and Microsoft are patent allies.
Motorola and Microsoft Debate the Scope of Google’s MPEG-LA License (Seattle) ~pj
The last time we looked in on the Microsoft v. Motorola litigation in Seattle, the judge, the Honorable James L. Robart, had just ruled that Motorola would have no right to injunctive relief in the US and Germany for its H.264 and 802.11 standard essential patent portfolios, at least not in the current set of facts, although he allowed that facts could change in the future.
The judge has asked [PDF] the parties to give him more information about Google’s license agreement with the MPEG-LA patent pool, and he set a hearing for oral argument for January 28 at 1:30 PM in Seattle on that issue and on a Microsoft motion for summary judgment on invalidity. If any of you can attend, that’d be wonderful.
We now can have a much clearer picture of the parties’ positions, now that we have both parties’ post-trial briefs on the subject of Google’s license agreement with MPEG-LA regarding H.264/AVC patent pool.
The crux of the debate is how to interpret one clause in the agreement, Section 8.3. Does it require Google to grant Microsoft a license to Motorola’s H.264-essential patents? Microsoft says it does, and Google says it does not. Google says it chose a license whereby it would have to list all affiliates it wished to be covered by the agreement, and to date it has not listed Motorola. It didn’t close on the Motorola deal until after it entered the license agreement with MPEG-LA anyway. And Motorola never on its own put any of its relevant patents into the MPEG-LA patent pool. So either way, Microsoft has no rights to a license via the MPEG-LA patent pool, Google argues, only by negotiated agreement under normal RAND terms, obviously at a higher rate.
The MPEG cartel has been used by the duopoly against free platforms, but Apple got hit recently, as covered here:
A federal jury in Delaware has found Apple’s iPhone infringes on three patents held by MobileMedia Ideas, a patent-holding company formed by Sony, Nokia and MPEG LA.
Here is more:
Apple Inc. (AAPL) lost an infringement case brought by patent-licensing firm MobileMedia Ideas LLC when a federal jury decided the maker of the iPhone misappropriated protected technology for the handheld devices.
Jurors in Wilmington, Delaware, deliberated about four hours after a weeklong trial before also concluding today that the three patents aren’t invalid.
Those trolls are connected to the MPEG cartel, unlike this entity:
Apple Inc. (AAPL) and LG Electronics Inc. (066570) didn’t infringe an Alcatel-Lucent SA (ALU) unit’s patents for electronic devices including phones and computers, a jury said.
The verdict today came after a trial that began Nov. 27 in federal court in San Diego over a 2010 lawsuit by the Paris- based company’s Multimedia Patent Trust accusing Apple and LG Electronics of copying video-compression technology that allows data to be sent more efficiently over communications media, including the Internet and satellites, or stored on DVDs and Blu-Ray disks.
This comes from Bloomberg. Plutocrats’ press likes to cover pro-Apple stories. █
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Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux at 3:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s latest abuses continue to show their effectiveness at preventing people from embracing free operating systems; FSF spearheads action against it
WITH Vista 8 came UEFI, which is probably its best ‘feature’ in Microsoft’s eyes; it helps discourage and deter against Linux booting. One blogger provides us with this story which shows UEFI in action (preventing ‘malware’ like Linux from booting):
During the last weeks, I spent several nights playing with UEFI and its extension called UEFI SecureBoot. I must admit that I have mixed feelings about UEFI in general; on one hand, you have a nice and modern “BIOS replacement” that can boot .efi files with no need for a bootloader like GRUB, on the other hand, some hardware, not even the most exotic one, is not yet glitch-free. But that’s what happens with new stuff in general. I cannot go much into detail without drifting away from the main topic, but surely enough, a simple google search about UEFI and Linux will point you to the problems I just mentioned above.
So far, not much has been done about it. The FSF ran an online petition which it plans to use quite soon based on articles like this one.
The Free Software Foundation is an organisation for which I have the utmost respect. Without it, the whole phenomenon of free and open source sofware would never have come to be.
The FSF has also been at the forefront of efforts to preserve freedom in computing and has stuck to its guns in the face of much criticism.
But on secure boot, it is lagging behind. I am surprised that it has not updated its campaign against secure boot, launched in October 2011, to include relevant facts. A great deal of material in the petition is now outdated and factually incorrect.
Here in this Web site we collected a lot of information on the subject and we also confronted key UEFI people. Christopher Tozzi talks about the FSF’s action as follows:
Still, the Free Software Foundation, one of the open-source channel’s most influential organizations in moral (if not financial) terms, is aggressively combating Secure Boot with a multi-channel campaign. The group plans to educate the public on avoiding Secure Boot-enabled hardware, pressure device manufacturers to avoid measures that will prevent consumers from installing the software they wish and combat Microsoft’s proposal for implementing a similar feature on ARM-powered smartphones and tablets.
To advance its efforts, the FSF has created a petition, signed so far by more than 40,000 individuals and 50 organizations. The signatories pledge not to purchase hardware that fails to “provide a sure-fire way for them to install and run a free software operating system of their choice.” The FSF also invites users to donate $50, although it’s not clear whether that money will be used to combat Secure Boot specifically, or support the FSF’s operations more generally.
What’s needed is regulatory action. It was needed all along, but Microsoft apologists helped legitmise what Microsoft had perpetrated. What we have now is a mess and no federal investigation. Mikkel Munch Mortensen writes today:
I paid for a genuine copy of Windows 8.
I tried installing it on a seperate disk next to Ubuntu on my desktop computer. When rebooting after install, it says there’s a problem with my OS that can’t be fixed. The error code is something like 00000001. I guess that’s a kinda fundamental error. Reinstall didn’t work.
I tried installing to my laptop, on a seperate disk that used to have another copy of #Windows8 on it, which I wiped, kinda just 4 the lulz. Even before I get to install anything, even before I get to enter my serial key, it says that the serial key I entered doesn’t match what is (whatever that “what” refers to, it’s a wiped disk) on the device (or something like that).
I spent 5 hours on this yesterday. I spend several hours about a month ago.
To me, it seems like #Microsoft tried so hard to avoid something like dualbooting/pirated copies/installation on secondary disks that it’s completely impossible to install their OS that I already deemed crappy, but really need for a few applications that is not (yet) available for Ubuntu or other Linuxes.
Or, maybe, it’s just Microsofts way of giving me the middle finger for ditching their OS as my primary OS years ago in favor of #Ubuntu.
Here is another story published earlier today to demonstrate UEFI abuses. The victim writes:
I really appreciate the helpful Windows 8 tips I’ve been getting from you. But there’s one issue I am struggling with: Linux, and specifically installing it on my Windows 8 computer.
I haven’t been able to get Linux to install properly, and I really don’t know why. One of my techie friends told me it has to do with a new Secure Boot feature in Windows 8.
Mission accomplished by Microsoft. Under the guise of ‘security’ it now sees its dream come true. This impedes GNU and Linux growth at a crucial time when Windows puts people off. █
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01.03.13
Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Global research and advisory firm, Forrester, said, “The explosion in open source projects in the HTML, mobile, cloud and big data spaces such as Android, jQuery, PhoneGap, Sencha, Hadoop and Cordova are driving a new model and a golden age of ‘app’ development.”
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Well another holiday season has come and gone, leaving more than a few jangled nerves and expanded waistlines in its wake.
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Desktop
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Samsung’s Google Chromebook is outselling MacBooks and notebooks with larger screens and larger hard drives. I guess it’s the software people love or the price …
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Kernel Space
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ADA, the 32-year-old programming language, had its latest 2012 version approved by the ISO this week.
ADA 2012 and introduced contract-based programming along with the ability to specify pre/post-conditions for sub-programs, and invariants for private types. Other enhancements advanced the areas of contrainers library, expressiveness for various features, and support for multi-core platforms.
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The Tux3 project has some interesting news to report for the new year. In
brief, the first time Hirofumi ever put together all the kernel pieces in his
magical lab over in Tokyo, our Tux3 rocket took off and made it straight to
orbit. Or in less metaphorical terms, our first meaningful benchmarks turned in
numbers that meet or even slightly beat the illustrious incumbent, Ext4:
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Linus Torvalds has responded to a Linux kernel maintainer about a bug he introduced and the discussion has gone off the reservation.
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It’s a new year, people are getting back to work, and trying desperately to forget the over-eating that has been going on for the last two weeks. And hey, to celebrate, here’s -rc2!
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Intel’s Software Development Kit provides Linux support for the QST sample application, but there hasn’t been a mainline Linux kernel hwmon driver for this technology that’s found within modern Intel chipsets.
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Graphics Stack
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This week the improved Radeon R600 Gallium3D HyperZ support was merged into mainline Mesa.
After the R300g HyperZ support was sharply improved and enabled by default in Mesa at the beginning of the month, improved R600g HyperZ support also emerged.
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The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that’s necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards.
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Intel is still working on some minor xf86-video-intel driver changes to address stability issues for the very old i830GM and i845G chipsets. A new Intel X.Org driver update was released on Wednesday to take care of more changes.
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As some extra benchmarks being published before the holidays, here’s some Linux OpenGL performance results comparing the frame-rate impact of FXAA to other anti-aliasing modes as supported by the latest NVIDIA 313 Linux Beta driver on a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Kepler.
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NVIDIA released Linux kernel patches this morning for supporting their next-gen “Tegra 4″ SoC under Linux. A few details were revealed within the code commits.
The set of nine patches for initial Linux kernel enablement of the new Tegra System-On-a-Chip provides the minimal support necessary for the Linux kernel to boot up into a shell console while the rest of the enablement code will come later.
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Applications
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The humble (and often, not-so-humble) text editor. It can be a wonderful thing. I know more than a few people who are zealous about their editors, and view them in the same way that they view their toothbrushes. Yes, they’re that hardcore.
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When writing a few days ago about the GemRB project as an open-source re-implementation of the Infinity Engine for Baldur’s Gate and then OpenMW as an open-source re-implementation of the engine used by Morrowind, a Phoronix reader pointed out Xoreos.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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OUYA , the first Android based gaming console in the world, is currently shipping devices for the developers and game makers. The concept started as a Kickstarter project and raised more funds than expected. The following video shows the first look of the developer console, its unboxing and usage.
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2012 what year! Has been full of ups for Linux this year and I think easily one of the most important years for Linux gaming, this is aimed to be a small roundup of 2012 with a reminder of interesting news, my thoughts on the year and so on.
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The ioquake3 project, the main open-source effort around the id Tech 3 engine, has announced some organizational changes concerning the popular game engine’s development.
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After releasing its Torque 3D game engine under the MIT licence in September 2012, GarageGames is now seeking crowdfunding to port it to Linux. The company had previously announced its plans to create a Linux port and the campaign on Indiegogo has been launched to fund this development. Estimating about three months of work for a single developer, GarageGames is asking for $29,487 (approximately £18,000), which it is trying to raise in just over a month.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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After more than one year of development, the Fluxbox team announced on December 30, 2012, that Fluxbox 1.3.3 is available for download and upgrade.
Fluxbox 1.3.3 is the third maintenance release from the 1.3 series of the window manager for Linux-based operating systems, bringing various improvements and bug fixes.
“So, the world is still rotating around the sun and before our calendar hits 2013 we decided to release a new stable version of fluxbox. This is mostly a bugfix release.” was stated in the official release announcement.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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2012 has been an important year for KDE from many perspectives. KDE e.V. turned 15 years old, Nokia finally quit Qt and a new ecosystem lead by Digia is laying on KDE to get mature. We have published our Manifesto, that is the result of long internal and very interesting conversations (I wouldn’t call them discussions) about who we are, how did we get here and what we want. ALERT, out first experience in EU R&D projects, is now a reality. KDE has broken every record in the GSoC program, our KDE 4 series is getting mature and attention is coming back little by little to our software since users are understanding that we are delivering what we promised. Plasma is way more than a crazy idea and now many people perceive how powerful can be, not in a few years, but in a few months.
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I tend to believe that the best interfaces have already been made. Behaviourally, CDE is the best and most consistent interface ever made. It looked like ass, but it always did exactly as you told it to, and it never did anything unexpected. When it comes to looks, however, the gold standard comes from an entirely different corner – Apple’s Platinum and QNX’ PhotonUI. Between all the transparency, flat-because-it’s-hip, and stitched leather violence of the past few years, one specific KDE theme stood alone in bringing the best of ’90s UI design into the 21st century, and updating it to give everything else a run for its money. This is an ode to Christoph Feck’s Skulpture.
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With today’s release of KDE 4.9.5 as the latest monthly point release, it’s been decided to delay the KDE 4.10 release. Due to last minute changes, an additional 4.10 release candidate has been deemed necessary and as a result the final version is being pushed back into February.
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For several years, Nokia sponsored and organized Qt Developer Days—the premier annual Qt event. This year, the primary sponsors were Digia, KDAB and ICS. KDE e.V. was also a partner, and KDE associates played a significant part in the conferences—one held in Berlin, and one a few weeks later in Silicon Valley. Qt DevDays in Silicon Valley was organized and produced on short notice by ICS. These organizations each had a major presence there. The following report is about KDE’s participation in Qt Developer Days Silicon Valley 2012.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 2 remains king of the Linux desktop. Here’s our GNOME 2 Linux review.
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After installing openSUSE 12.2 / GNOME 3.4.2 on my new machine i found that all the context menus or right click menus were looking plain and bland. Something was missing in the menus . After a while i figured that icons were missing in the menus.
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Sometimes, privacy and open-source can seem like an odd mix. People who prioritize openness and transparency in their software might appear less likely to obsess over the privacy of their data. But in a reminder that rock-solid privacy standards and open-source software are not mutually exclusive, the GNOME community has announced a new campaign centered on making the GNOME desktop interface “one of the most secure computing environments available.”
When it comes to basic privacy features, GNOME is already at least as robust as any other mainstream computing interface. It doesn’t do anything particularly reckless to expose user data to abuse. Furthermore, some might argue that, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Ubuntu’s Amazon.com search integration into GNOME’s competitor Unity, GNOME is the more obvious choice for Linux users concerned about keeping their personal information to themselves.
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If you are looking for a light weight version of Ubuntu a new Linux OS called Precise Puppy might be worth more investigation, and has been specifically designed to run on USB flash drives, mini PCs and the like.
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New Releases
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Sorry for the delay, was planning on releasing Ultimate Edition 3.5 prior to Xmas. Seems some hacker decided to delete my acct on sourceforge. Problem resolved those guys are awesome. Just to bring you up to date, I have Ultimate Edition 3.6 in local testing based on Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”. I am currently running Ultimate Edition 3.4 Lite based on Ubuntu 12.04 Percise Pangolin with a solo environment of Gnome 2 which is quick quite responsive.
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A new version of Slax Linux is available for download. This release adds several new features and fixes few bugs as well. Probably the most interesting feature is PXE boot support and improved X autodetection.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Charles-H. Schulz has posted of the news that “OpenMandriva Association is now fully incorporated and functional.” He’s quite excited by the news reflected not just in his words, but the number of his posts that appeared in my feeds. I found three posts just by accident.
But Schulz’ excitement is justified. This milestone officially makes OpenMandriva a community project. As Schulz said in several ways, OpenMandriva (or whatever will be the official name of the distribution) “is now legally independent and fully autonomous.”
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Gentoo Family
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Nowadays I see lots of new blog posts about how to contribute in open source projects and I decided to write a blog post about how to contribute to Gentoo Linux and become a vital part of the project.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora 18 hasn’t even been released yet, but feature planning for Fedora 19 is well underway.
Fedora 19 should be released in late May under the codename of Schrödinger’s Cat.
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Debian Family
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The port of Debian GNU/Linux for the Motorola 68000 processors has been revived, which now allows for a working Debian OS to run once again on computers like the Amiga 3000/4000 and Atari.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While there has been a Wayland back-end within GTK+ 3.x, Canonical won’t be enabling the Wayland support within their GTK+ tool-kit package anytime soon.
Wayland can run GTK applications when using GTK+ 3.x where there is the Wayland back-end and is in very good shape and GTK+ can handle multiple back-ends. GTK’s Wayland support is just a matter of passing –enable-wayland-backend while configuring GTK+ for building.
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When it comes to cloud computing — which Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has earmarked as a major focus for Canonical in 2013 — one of the Ubuntu ecosystem’s most innovative projects is JuJu, a solution for deploying cloud services. JuJu is already mature and useful, but Ubuntu developers envision expanding on it in major ways in the new year, as evidence from mailing archives and Canonical announcements reveals.
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My college professor wanted to install Ubuntu in our labs and use it as the default operating system for students. There were some 20 machines, and it was quite a hard task (or to say, impossible) to install Ubuntu and the required software (Codeblocks, bluefish, LAMP etc) one by one on all those machines. While I was searching for a solution, I came across Booster, which makes it easier to install Ubuntu on multiple machines.
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After work, school, finishing a project, etc, movies are definitely a way of relaxing ourselves, artistic expressions that, especially nowadays, feature a wide and diverse range of topics, such as comedies, thrillers, fantasy, etc.
The Web is a rich source of movie details, including pictures, actors, cast, money budget, descriptions, etc, details usually searched by users in order to select a movie and/or decide if going to a theater to watch a specific movie, as well as for broadening our knowledge on what, who, where, why, etc, related to the film industry.
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There tends to be varying opinions about what Canonical has done in the Linux world over the last few years. Some users love the easier to use and more “pretty” design of Unity, the UI behind the popular Ubuntu OS. Others hate what Ubuntu has become with a passion.
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2012 was the year Microsoft finally unveiled its touch-friendly new operating system to the world, signalling where the computing industry is at and where it’s heading.
Indeed, touchscreen tablets and smartphones are very much the order of the day, something that Microsoft was clearly mindful of with its Windows 8 launch. And at Canonical‘s headquarters in central London this afternoon, The Next Web got wind of the latest version of its flagship operating system…Ubuntu. For smartphones.
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Ubuntu Linux is coming to smartphones. Canonical — the British outfit that oversees Ubuntu — has built a new version of the open source operating system for touchscreens, and unlike other smartphone operating systems, it will work as a full desktop OS when connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
“We are confident that Ubuntu will ship on phones from large manufacturers in 2013,” says Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth.
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Despite the looming presence of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, Canonical and Samsung will bring new smartphone operating systems to market.
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The Ubuntu Phone OS is no doubt the hottest topic in the OS space right now (if you missed it, we talked about it here). However, whats even more interesting is the SDK that is offered to developers to write apps for it. With an option to write apps using HTML5, the SDK offers developers a chance to use the Qt cross platform application development toolkit.
The reason this is interesting for developers is that they have freedom to use all the native features of the platform, thanks to Qt applications not depending on a intermediate layer (like JVM on Android). And if that isn’t enough, the UI designer will have absolute flexibility of prototyping and designing the UI using QML (or otherwise known as QtQuick) which is a JSON-like declarative language that allows you to design a fluid and modern user experience.
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As you’ve probably seen, Canonical has just announced Ubuntu on phones. We’re all very excited about it, especially since so many of us have been working hard on this project. Here’s an insight into the design of the new phone pages on ubuntu.com.
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Looking past the irony that QML will be available for all platforms but WP8 in the short-term, and Nokias previous involvement in the development of QML, it is nice to see the platforms being created.
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anonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has announced a new version of Ubuntu designed specifically for smartphones.
Ubuntu for phones is based on the Linux kernel and uses the same Unity user interface that Canonical has developed for the desktop, which the company says should make it immediately familiar to anyone who has used Ubuntu before.
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First, the good news — Ubuntu, the most popular Linux operating system on desktops and laptops, just announced they’re unveiling a smartphone that they call a “superphone that’s also a full PC”. In other words, this smartphone will be able to run desktop apps on a mobile phone, and can be hooked up to a monitor and operate as a full-fledged computer.
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In surprising news from jolly old England, Canonical announces that Ubuntu has developed an Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets. We’ll be able to switch out Android for Ubuntu on many existing devices. The company also hopes that manufactures will ship devices with it pre-installed.
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Same drill, new distros. Just like six months ago, I want to tell you all about the boot times of the latest Ubuntu family, named Quantal Quetzal. While you may argue that this is a trivial segment of the overall computing business, you cannot deny the fact companies are placing quite a bit of emphasis on it, plus a lot of people seem to like reading about this kind of stuff. Well, it’s easily measured and can create a lot of buzz. So let us buzz.
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No hardware.
No code.
No e-mails to community mailing list.”
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Flavours and Variants
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The mainline Bodhi desktop repositories recently received the gift of stable E17 packages and this same present isn’t far off for our ARMHF branch. In the mean time however I have prepared and shared new ARMHF images for the Raspberry PI and Samsung Chromebook.
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I recently took a look at Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon. Now it’s time to review its counterpart Linux Mint 14 MATE. The MATE desktop environment is a fork of GNOME 2. It offers a more traditional desktop experience than Cinnamon. Please see the MATE about page for some background information.
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Whether you have a new Raspberry Pi and are just figuring out what you can do with it or don’t have your hands on one yet but want to get started learning more about programming and other computer science topics, the free Raspberry Pi Education Manual is a wonderful 172-page resource.
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Been staring at that Raspberry Pi trying to figure out where to start? You’re hardly alone. We’ve spent some time with the diminutive Linux machine and even tried to point you in the right direction when booting up your Pi for the first time. If you’re looking for something a little more in depth than our own tutorial however, its worth checking out the just released Raspberry Pi Education Manual. The book, drafted by a team of teachers from Computing at School (CAS) and released under the Creative Commons licence, is available for free either through the Pi Store or at the source link in PDF form. It’s a little more education-focused than say a tome like Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, but it’s certainly an excellent introduction to the platform.
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The $100 Zealz GK802 is powered by an ARM-based Freescale i.MX6 quad-core processor paired with 1GB Of RAM and 8GB of storage.
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Phones
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Samsung, which became a market leader thanks to Android, is reportedly working on a smartphone powered by Linux-based Tizen operating system. H-Online reports that Samsung is working with Docomo to create a Tizen powered smartphone. “Apparently, the devices are scheduled to come on the market in Japan and other countries during 2013. As well as Docomo, other mobile telephony providers including Vodafone and France Telecom and manufacturers such as Panasonic and NEC have also reportedly been contributing to the development of Tizen devices.”
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After HTC kicked off the trend with its “Butterfly,” there is a great deal of momentum around the adoption of Full HD (FHD; 1920×1080) displays in smartphones. Like the Butterfly, many of these devices will use 5” FHD displays, with a stunning 441 ppi (pixels per inch) resolution.
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The developers behind the Open webOS project have brought the mobile operating system to Google’s Nexus 7 tablet.
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Ballnux
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Android
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Indian government, along with Indian Institutes of Technology and C-DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing) launched an upgraded version of Aakash 2 last November. The device shipped with a capacitive touch screen, upgraded 1 Ghz processor with 512 MB of RAM and Android Ice Cream Sandwich. According to a Times of India report, the makers are planning to make it more open by including Linux as the default operating system in its next edition, Aakash 3.
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Remember when netbooks were the hottest item in PC land? You could hardly go a week without being buried under an avalanche of new netbook announcements. My, how things have changed. Strictly speaking, the netbook category is no more. Asus is reportedly ending its Eee PC line, and Acer hasn’t announced plans to launch any new netbook models. The same goes for MSI and all the other netbook players. So, what happened?
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Polaroid’s newish image as a digital media company got one more boost today, with the launch of a new, $150 Android tablet aimed specifically at children. Simply/obviously branded the “Polaroid kids tablet,” the 7-inch device has sidestepped the holiday shopping rush to try its luck instead launching among the throng at the CES show later this month in Las Vegas.
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If not the year, it was still an impressive year for open source in libraries. It was 2004 when I first learned about the Koha open source integrated library system and started researching what it would mean to our library to make the switch to open source. Back then, when I asked people if they knew what open source was or if they had heard of Koha, I heard “no” a lot more than I do now. Now, people call me up and ask me to come to their libraries to speak about open source and help them find the right products for their library. Now, I hardly ever hear, “We can’t pick open source because it’s too immature.” Instead people contact me to ask what they have to do to get their hands on the latest and greatest release of Koha. It’s because of these changes that I’m seeing in the library professionals I meet that I proclaim 2012 the year of open source in libraries!
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I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year on behalf of the entire LQ team. 2012 has been another great year for LQ and we have quite a few exciting developments in store for 2013, including a major code update that we originally had planned for late 2012.
Unfortunately, 2012 has been another quiet year from a blogging perspective, but I do regularly post to the LQ twitter account. Posting more lengthy commentary here is something I’ll try to be more cognizant of this year.
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Operating Systems
Windows 53.56%
Linux 35.54%
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Despite the increasing affordability of computers, the software that actually runs those devices can still be fairly expensive. Fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office can run hundreds of dollars, and higher-end products like Adobe Photoshop can easily cost more than $500.
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Genetic networks control cellular functions. Aberrations in normal cellular function arecaused by mutations in genes that disrupt the fine tuning of genetic networks and causedisease or disorder.
However, the large number of signalling molecules, genes and proteinsthat constitute such networks, and the consequent complexity of interactions, has restrainedprogress in research elucidating disease mechanisms. Hence, carrying out a systematicanalysis of how diseases alter the character of these networks is important.
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Events
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SaaS/Big Data
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Education
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Open-source enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Alfresco has become the latest to sign on board with Amazon’s cloud services. For the IT community at midsize firms, this marks another step in Amazon’s establishment in the enterprise cloud space. It also marks another small step in the growth and mainstreaming of the open-source movement.
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BSD
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First of all we tried switching default cache type from write-through to write-back type. It should have increased performance but instead opened a can of worms. Memory corruption debugging led to L2 cache driver on Pandaboard, EHCI driver code and subsequently to busdma code. Whole process took quite a few days full of hair-pulling and nagging various people and ended up in committing USB fixes and Ian Lepore’s busdma patches. PL310 (L2 cache controller) driver is being tested at this very moment. Original issue (WB caches) still stands and postponed till next year.
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For those of you currently on NetBSD 6.0 or are using NetBSD 5.x as your operating system but have been wanting a reason to upgrade, the first NetBSD 6.0.x point release has surfaced.
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While just released on Friday, FreeBSD has already pulled LLVM/Clang 3.2 into its “head” repository and will be pushing it into the FreeBSD 9/Stable series in the weeks ahead.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Cassandra, the distributed, column-oriented NoSQL database, has been updated to version 1.2, says the Apache Software Foundation. Version 1.2 of Cassandra sees the official release of CQL3, which was introduced in beta in April 2012′s Cassandra 1.1 release. CQL is the modelling and query language for Cassandra that borrows, syntactically, from SQL to offer a more familiar database environment for developers. CQL3 allows for multi-column primary keys and many other changes, which are now established.
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The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Cassandra. Version 1.2 of the Cassandra big data “NoSQL” distributed database introduces several new features to the open-source project.
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Public Services/Government
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A clear majority in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.
The new IT strategy on Thursday evening got 36 votes in favour and 20 against, reports one of the city council members, Matthias Stürmer. He described the new approach as “ground breaking”. One year ago, the city council adopted a motion for Bern to develop an open source strategy. The council now takes a further step, asking for an IT strategy that increases the use of open source and that aims to achieve long-term cost savings.
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Licensing
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One disturbing trend is the posting of FOSS modules without licenses. Simon Phipps focused on this problem in his recent blog, particularly on the problems raised by the terms of service at Github. James Governor, the founder of analyst Red Monk, is quoted by Simon as stating: “”younger devs today are about POSS – Post open source software. f*** the license and governance, just commit to github” http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/github-needs-take-open-source-seriously-208046. Ironically, this approach will undercut the major desire of most FOSS developers: the broad use of their code. The lack of a license ensures that the software will be removed from any product meant to be used by corporations. Corporations are very sensitive about ensuring that all software that they use or which is incorporated in their products is properly licensed. I have worked on hundreds of FOSS analysis and the response to software without a clear license is almost always “rip it out”.
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Programming
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To succeed the feature-rich Git 1.8 release, Git 1.8.1 was released on New Year’s Eve with a few new features.
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Islamist militants in Timbuktu destroyed graves and shrines associated with Sufism this year. Ancient manuscripts are not directly threatened, but some fear they are next.
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Q: There has been much coverage of the hunger strike by Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence. I’m not interested in the politics — instead, I want to address the ethics of a hunger strike. Look at what it really is: a person slowly commits suicide to pressure others into giving what he or she wants. The most unethical part is that thousands of Canadians are encouraging Spence in her suicide by supporting her. It’s one thing for a child who didn’t get a toy to swear never to eat again, but we should expect more from a community leader.
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Users of Apple’s iPhone will have to wait until Monday for its latest bug to fix itself.
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MorphOS, the Amiga-compatible PowerPC operating system, is still being experimented with on PowerPC hardware. The latest effort out of the MorphOS camp is to make the operating system work on the IBM PowerPC G5.
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Fox Broadcasting, having lost a key court ruling last month, is more eager than ever to kick Dish Network’s new ad-skipping Hopper DVR off the market.
Last month, a federal judge found that Dish’s DVRs probably don’t break copyright law, ruling that the Hoppers can stay on the market and operate normally while Fox proceeds with its lawsuit. Fox is arguing that it can’t wait, and it says that Dish’s product has the potential to do serious damage to various aspects of the ad-supported TV business. As promised, it appealed the lower court decision and has now filed its opening brief at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (PDF via Deadline.com).
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“They were very hardworking,” he said. “They dug down surprisingly deeply. They spent a lot of time going through documentary evidence.”
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European regulators appear headed toward a dramatically different conclusion to their antitrust probe of Google than their American counterparts — a binding agreement that could cost the search company dearly if violated.
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Security
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For those interested in cryptography, BLAKE2 has been announced as a new alternative for MD5 and SHA-2/3 algorithms. The benefits of BLAKE2 is better security than MD5 while being higher performance in software.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.
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The Special Investigations Unit has closed an investigation into a police brutality complaint because of the Toronto Police Services “refusal to disclose” the statement from an alleged victim, according to SIU director Ian Scott.
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Just one day before last month’s elementary-school killings in Newtown, Conn., Canada offered its gun merchants “new market opportunities” to export banned assault weapons to Colombia, one of the world’s most violent countries.
Canada quietly eased its ban on the export of assault-style weapons to Colombia after Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird recommended an order amending the Automatic Firearms Country Control List.
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A federal judge on Wednesday rejected The New York Times’ bid to force the U.S. government to disclose more information about its targeted killing of people it believes have ties to terrorism, including American citizens.
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A federal judge dismissed most of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which sought records on the United States government’s targeted killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, Anwar’s son who were US citizens. It also dismissed a narrower lawsuit filed by the New York Times.
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Despite several news reports of CIA involvement during the Benghazi attacks, there is no mention of the intelligence agency in a special report that was released yesterday by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
On Sept. 11, 2012, at about 9:40 p.m., Ambassador Chris Stevens and his security team came under attack at a diplomatic facility in Benghazi. One mile away was a secret facility used by the CIA, according to various media reports. The facility is discussed in the report, but it doesn’t say who it was used by or what it was used for.
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A German criminal who worked for the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September has revealed in a new book that the CIA recruited him following the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to thwart anti-Israel activities.
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In the years since the Afghanistan invasion, the CIA, long a covert intelligence gathering body, entered a phase of growing militancy that has rendered headline after headline in U.S. mainstream media — and that’s due in no small part to its relationship with military operators.
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Two U.S. drone strikes on northwest Pakistan killed a senior Taliban commander who fought American forces in Afghanistan but had a truce with the Pakistani military, intelligence officials said Thursday.
The commander, Maulvi Nazir, was among nine people killed in a missile strike on a house in the village of Angoor Adda in the South Waziristan tribal region near the border with Afghanistan late Wednesday night, five Pakistani security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
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Nazir and his followers have been the targets of numerous US drone strikes in the past several years. Of the 328 strikes since 2004, 81 have hit targets in South Waziristan. Several of Nazir’s deputies and commanders have been killed in those strikes.
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Saudi Arabia has provided fighter jets to assist the United States with its drone strikes against Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, the London Times reported on Friday.
US drones are backing Yemeni forces combating militants of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The group’s Yemen branch is considered by Washington to be the most active and deadliest franchise of the global jihadist network.
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American drones have claimed three lives in Yemen and between nine and 15 lives in Pakistan since Jan. 1.
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Drone strikes are the weapon of choice in the current phase of the endless “war on terror.” They have become the trademark instrument of the Obama presidency, which has dedicated itself to eliminating any Islamic jihadi who may now or in the future constitute a threat to the United States. That category includes all those who identify themselves as members of an al-Qaeda affiliate whether in Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Libya or Pakistan; the Taliban in either Afghan or Pakistani variant; anyone placed on the White House’s secret “kill list” not an explicit member of the above mentioned groups; as well as anyone who is seen as providing material or ideological support to these groups and/or persons. American citizens outside the United States are also subject to summary execution by drone, as occurred with Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son in Yemen last year.
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Whatever our respective views are on the subject of drone strikes, it is undeniably the case that they are an incredibly effective method of targeting terrorists in unfriendly, or uncontrolled territory.
Of the many successful drone strikes in 2012, the following are – according to CNN’s Security Clearance blog – the most pertinent. June 4th saw al Qaeda strategist Abu Yahya al-Libi meet the ‘business end of a drone‘ in Pakistan, an occurrence that I argued should both be celebrated and mourned. Fahd Mohammad Ahmed al-Quso, another senior al Qaeda operative (wanted for his role in the USS Cole bombing), was killed in Yemen on May 6th. And lastly Badar Mansoor, considered the most senior Pakistani in al Qaeda, was assassinated on February 9th in Waziristan.
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In the latest sign that President Obama’s targeted killing program may be forever shrouded in secrecy, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon has denied a Freedom of Information Request from the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times over the death of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old American-born son of former Al-Queda heavy Anwar al-Awlaki who was killed by a drone strike.
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Cablegate
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Zanu PF has warned its bigwigs to watch their mouths when meeting with American envoys amid revelations that party “stalwarts” last week clandestinely met United States ambassador Bruce Wharton.
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“Major Sri Lankan Papers April 15 have head lined a report (First published in the April 3 London Observer) which quotes both Indian High Commissioner J.N. Dixit and an LTTE spokesman in Madras that Indian Prime Minister Gandhi agreed in late July to pay the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam a monthly stipend to compensate for lost Tax revenues following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka accord.” the US Embassy Colombo informed Washington.
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This week, I was proud to join the board and help launch the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a new organization which plans on crowd-funding for a variety of independent journalism outlets whose prime mission is to seek transparency and accountability in government. You can read about the first group of four organizations — which includes the National Security Archive, MuckRock News, and The UpTake and WikiLeaks — here.
Recently, I sat down with George Washington Law School professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley and my close friend Kevin McCabe to discuss WikiLeaks’ impact on transparency, the government’s response, and the comparison to the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg (also a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation). (And see a previous conversation with Jonathan Turley here.)
WikiLeaks was extralegally cut off from funding after two Congressmen successfully pressured Visa, Mastercard and PayPal into refusing to do business with the journalism organization in late 2010. We hope that the Freedom of the Press Foundation will become a bulwark against these types of unofficial censorship tactics in the future.
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Finance
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Throughout the months of November and December, a steady stream of corporate CEOs flowed in and out of the White House to discuss the impending fiscal cliff. Many of them, such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, would then publicly come out and talk about how modest increases of tax rates on the wealthy were reasonable in order to deal with the deficit problem. What wasn’t mentioned is what these leaders wanted, which is what’s known as “tax extenders”, or roughly $205B of tax breaks for corporations. With such a banal name, and boring and difficult to read line items in the bill, few political operatives have bothered to pay attention to this part of the bill. But it is critical to understanding what is going on.
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For better or worse, a bill passed Congress in the wee hours of 2013 averting the much-hyped “fiscal cliff” for now and raising taxes on couples making over $450,000 and extending a lifeline of unemployment benefits to 2 million Americans.
But the vote is not so much an ending as a beginning to the austerity battles of 2013.
As the economy continues to stagger, the search for a “grand bargain” on taxes and critical social programs is likely to roll from fiscal cliff to debt ceiling negotiations into the annual budget battles. While some feel that a “grand bargain” is less likely than “death by 1,000 cuts,” the ongoing debate will continue to pose serious risks for average Americans who will need to stay engaged.
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Search giant’s Indian arm accused of misleading tax authorities by underdeclaring revenue from AdWords and evading taxes through international transactions, but Google India denies the claim.
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Paulson & Co., the New York hedge fund, was named as a defendant in a proposed revised lawsuit by ACA Financial Guaranty Corp. (MANF) against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) over a collateralized debt obligation called Abacus.
Paulson and Goldman Sachs conspired to induce ACA to provide financial guaranty insurance for the Abacus deal, which was “doomed to fail,” the firm said in papers filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. ACA, which sued Goldman Sachs in 2011, is seeking court permission to file a revised complaint adding Paulson as a defendant.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Several high-powered senators are continuing their fight against “Zero Dark Thirty,” a film many see as vindicating the use of enhanced interrogation tactics in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
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New details are emerging about how a multi-millionaire used shell corporations to funnel money to the Super PAC associated with embattled Tea Party group FreedomWorks for America — and how those laundered contributions may have violated federal law.
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Censorship
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This is an online shop – meaning the block was affecting their ability to sell their products. The block was spotted and reported to Virgin Mobile in early December. The problem has not yet been fixed. So the block was in effect over Christmas, and will have affected the site’s ability to reach their market in one of the more important retail periods of the year.
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Privacy
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s policy changes for its Internet products including Hotmail and Bing are being formally examined by European data protection regulators for potential privacy issues.
Updates to Microsoft’s services agreement, which took effect Oct. 19, are being formally reviewed, EU privacy regulators wrote to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer and the head of Microsoft Luxembourg. Luxembourg’s and France’s data protection commissions are leading the examination, according to the Dec. 17 letter, obtained by Bloomberg News.
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Microsoft made the policy changes on October 19
Microsoft just can’t catch a break from the European Commission.
The EU now plans to investigate the tech giant’s recent policy changes and how they may affect the privacy of its users. The policy changes were in regards to Microsoft’s Internet services like Bing and Hotmail.
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Civil Rights
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Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked that a publication owned by Rupert Murdoch would be inclined to make light of concerns about illegal wiretapping, but surely it’s not that mysterious why someone might be more comfortable with a duly authorized surveillance statute that preserves a role for the courts, however anemic and symbolic, than with a president’s unilateral decision to simply ignore federal law and bypass the courts entirely. Still, they do have a point: Substantively the FISA Amendments Act is at least arguably more problematic than the Bush program, because the surveillance programs it authorizes are potentially much more sweeping than Bush’s was, at least on the basis of public reporting. And it really is telling that many people who expressed outrage over the Bush program seem totally uninterested in scrutinizing the track record of its successor now that we have a Democrat in the White House.
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TSA agents were also on duty outside of the stadium. A special division called VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) was there to conduct searches.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Not content with dedicated treaties developed under the aegis of WIPO, the copyright industries saw such general trade agreements as yet opportunity to impose their maximalist agendas. This led to chapters dealing with intellectual monopolies like copyright and patents not only being added to such agreements, but becoming the tail that wagged the dog. That can be seen from the fact that ACTA was killed in the European Parliament last year precisely because the chapter dealing with copyright and patents was regarded as so flawed that it vitiated the entire treaty, which had to be rejected despite other sections that were viewed very favourably by many MEPs.
Moreover, in the current negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is a kind of ACTA for the Pacific rim, it is once more the disproportionate demands of the copyright and patent world that threaten to scupper the entire treaty as countries rebel at the onerous terms the US is trying to impose.
That means the otherwise welcome trade agreement between EU and US is bound to have a similar chapter that attempts to push through many or most of the bad ideas that infected ACTA. There’s already a precedent for this in CETA, the Canada-European Union Trade Agreement that I wrote about back in October last year. As I noted, the criminal sanctions there were directly modelled on ACTA’s.
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Copyrights
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Vince Cable, the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable outlined several different measures, including a sped-up patent processing service that can deliver patents in just three months — it currently can take years — as well as informational campaigns aimed at younger individuals that are more likely to engage in pirating copyrighted material. Cable also said that a special crime unit, aimed specifically at illegal downloaders, would be created in partnership with the City of London police.
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: What Microsoft resorts to amid reports of mobile failure with the “8″-washed operating systems
A person whom I follow, Karthikeyan A K, wrote about a day ago in JoinDiaspora:
had a hard time removing #windows8 and installing #ubuntu on a system. #UEFI sucks.
With tactics like UEFI Microsoft is desperate to stop Linux because its own operating systems are a disaster:
Microsoft Is Fast Turning Into A Sideshow
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If Windows 8 is Exhibit A, Exhibit B is Windows Phone 8. Nokia has started discounting recently launched Lumia phones, indicating that they’re not exactly moving like hotcakes. Microsoft makes excuses and says these things take time, but even a fool can tell a torrid introduction from a lukewarm launch.
As we showed in the previous post, daemonising Google has become one tactic and it’s weak. Microsoft now lashes out at Google for not writing software for Windows Phone despite the claim that:
Windows Phone is estimated to account for a mere 2.6% of the mobile market and adoption of Windows 8 is said to be weak as well.
Gordon (thistleweb) writes, “no matter how many storms of shit #Microsoft find themselves in, you can’t help feel anything other than #karma for their behaviour… shit happens when your CEO promises to “kill” them”.” █
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Posted in Microsoft at 9:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Interesting employer ties seen around Microsoft’s daemoniser of Google
THE AstroTurfing firm that we see here turns out to have more Microsoft connections than we knew about. Our contributor iophk asks, “wasn’t Burston-Marsteller the same firm that both MS and Facebook hired to smear Google? There are also other instances of cross contamination.”
We seem to have missed this news about Mark Penn’s origin:
After six years leading PR giant Burson-Marsteller, CEO Mark Penn is leaving the firm for a new job at Microsoft, where he will help shape its brand image. His new gig: Corporate vice president of strategic and special projects. In that role, Penn, who served as senior strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, will lead “a small interdisciplinary team” focused on “consumer initiatives,” according to the announcement by Microsoft. He’ll report directly to CEO Steve Ballmer.
The anti-Google campaigns by Penn were recently covered in [1, 2 , 3]. Add that to news reminiscent of Wikipedia airbrushing by Waggener Edstrom, which is akin to this act of censorship by Penn’s company:
Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant, who is often used as a “crisis management” PR firm for clients undergoing bad press appears to need some outside help in handling its own crisis management…
[...]
And, now it’s gotten worse, as Burson has been caught deleting critical posts from its Facebook page, forcing the company to sort of, but not really, apologize again, and say they’ll reach out to the person who had posted a link to some of the coverage of the company’s Facebook wall, and tell her she can put it back up. The company also tried to brush it off by saying that its Facebook page had been receiving “a lot of profanity,” and that was all they were seeking to delete. That a basic story about the controversy got deleted in the process… well… I guess that’s just collateral damage.
If PR includes deletion, then why not? It is not as though ethics are a major consideration for people in this occupation. █
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01.01.13
Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The year 2012 has been extremely successful for the GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies. These technologies dominated almost every aspect of the IT world. Here are some of the top movers & shakers which changed the IT landscape in 2012 and hold great promises for the future.
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Desktop
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For many PC users, the prospect of switching away from Mac or Windows and onto Linux can be a nerve-wracking one.
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Server
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I have always been a bit curious of the open source communities support of Google. I have even seen distros include “web apps” that launch a browser to open Google Docs or Gmail. I can understand the reasoning, to a point. Good desktop applications are difficult to come by on Linux, (seriously, you can’t argue this point, don’t try.) while Gmail is an absolutely best of breed email client. However, given that you use a Linux desktop for the control over the platform it gives you, it is a curious choice to relinquish that control, especially over such personal information as email, to a closed source solution that just happens to be hosted on a server instead of your local machine.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Jon Masters examines performance tweaks for the Linux kernel and summarises the latest goings-on in the kernel community
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Graphics Stack
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Up this holiday weekend on Phoronix are benchmarks of the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D when comparing the driver’s state on the Git branches of Mesa 9.0 and Mesa 9.1-devel. While checking in on the latest Mesa Nouveau code, three NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were benchmarked from a development snapshot of Ubuntu 13.04.
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Patches surfaced on the Mesa mailing list on Saturday morning for supporting the OpenGL ARB_texture_multisample extension within core Mesa and the Intel i965 DRI driver.
A set of 26 patches against Mesa were needed for this initial ARB_texture_multisample implementation. The only driver implementing the support with these patches is the Intel DRI driver and even there it’s only on right now for Intel Sandy Bridge “Gen6″ hardware. For the newer Ivy Bridge “Gen7″, there’s still some IVB-specific things that aren’t done or properly tested. Even for Sandy Bridge with these patches, there’s some HiZ interactions that are likely wrong along with some other likely issues.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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For many gamers, Steam is the most banked-upon tool in their gaming inventory. You can purchase, gift and play games using the software and also you can communicate with other players. Led by Gabe Newell, Steam is widely appreciated for being one of the nicest gaming companies around. For years, Steam was available only on Windows. Then, of course, Valve Corporation decided to branch out to other platforms as well leading to the release of Steam for Mac OS X in 2010. 2 years later, Steam brought good news for many Linux fans and gamers alike. This year, Valve released Steam Beta for Linux, a fully native port of the amazing gaming software bringing world-class gaming to this often-overlooked platform. With the release came the announcement of porting of Left 4 Dead 2 on this platform.
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Also still being actively developed is the Tesseract fork of Sauerbraten, which delivers vastly improved graphics and other engine-level improvements to the open-source code-base. The Tesseract Git repository is still seeing new commits with the most recent work being from yesterday.
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I’ve bought Humble Bundle 7 (still available for 24 hours) and a big positive surprise of this bundle has been Legend of Grimrock.
This is a classic RPG game, you’ll have the control of 4 characters that you can choose between 4 races and 3 classes with these “heroes” you’ll have to walk in a dark dungeon searching to regain your freedom.
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Here on the first day of 2013, it’s already very clear that this year will be a banner year for open source gaming, what with players like Valve and Ouya poised to deliver game platforms based on open source tools. Mobile phones and tablets have also become havens for games, though, (think of Angry Birds) and it’s clear that Mozilla wants to woo game developers for its upcoming Firefox OS mobile operating system.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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digiKam team has announced release candidate of digiKam software collection 3.0.0. This version brings fix for more than 30 issues. This is the first release candidate after 3 beta releases. This release also focuses on the students projects in digiKam Google summer of code 2012.
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KDE’s photo management software, DigiKam, is preparing for the final release of version 3.0. DigiKam 3.0 introduces many changes and released this weekend was the 3.0 release candidate as a preview version.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Broadway, the HTML5 back-end for GTK3 that allows GTK applications to be rendered within a modern web-browser and served via a server, now has support for initiating multiple processes. The Broadway multi-process support is similar to running an X11 Server session with multiple windows.
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We constantly hear about new security threats and companies that have been breached. As such, it’s understandable for some of us to be paranoid about security in order to prevent any possible attacks. If you’re not at least a little bit paranoid, you might want to read up on which site was the last one to have passwords stolen from.
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2012 was another full year of major Linux distribution releases from the top vendors in the space. Though it was also a year in which at least two projects were hit with release delays.
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New Releases
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Screenshots
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst has offered the open-source world a “Red Hat State of the Union” blog, in which he outlines the progress the company made in 2012 and anecdotes on open-source technology. Although Whitehurst is touting Red Hat’s success, he brings to light major trends reshaping how partners build technology portfolios and engage with businesses.
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Debian Family
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Privacy over the Internet is becoming more and more important day by day. While it is believed that its impossible to obtain complete anonymity, security conscious people have striven for years to make a system that will ensure maximum anonymity and security. One such operating system that claims to give users full control over their privacy is Whonix.
Based on the Debian operating system, this OS uses Tor and VirtualBox to make one anonymous to outside world. As noted in their website: Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user’s real IP/location.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Only a few weeks ago, many Ubuntu loyalists were expressing fury that Canonical decided to incoporate Amazon search results on the Ubuntu desktop. Richard Stallman and Jono Bacon even weighed in on the matter, as did the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now, starting up a new round of debate, Alen Bell has delivered a Gnome Shell extension that brings online shopping results to Gnome Shell’s Dash. According to some, this extension shows how to deliver shopping results to the Linux desktop correctly.
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“Canonical is kicking off the New Year with a bang, and launching a brand new Ubuntu product,” the online magazine quoted the release as saying. “We’ll be holding an exclusive event hosted by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, to give full details of what we believe is the next generation of cross platform operating system.”
[...]
Anyone expecting to run Android applications within Ubuntu, however, will be disappointed.
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A countdown teaser has been posted to the Ubuntu homepage that’s currently set to expire on January 2nd. The banner bears a “So close, you can almost touch it” tagline, implying an announcement based on touch support for the OS. That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering Canonical’s recent hints at the future of Ubuntu. In a Slashdot Q&A last month, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth made it fairly clear that a cross-device OS was on the cards, with full mobile and tablet support set for Ubuntu 14.04 sometime in 2014.
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Recent news reports indicate Linux has now reached 42% of consumer devices, largely through the explosive popularity of the Android…
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Flavours and Variants
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The Enlightenment desktop has got its first stable release after almost 12 years of development and currently tarballs are available for compilation and installation on your machine. You can also install it binaries in your system by using the package manager of your distro.
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Phones
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Samsung Rumored to Release Open-Source, Tizen-Based Phone in 2013 Samsung is a big player when it comes to making some of the most popular Android phones, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also like to dabble in their own, Google-free side-projects. According to Japan’s Daily Yomiuri, Samsung aims to launch its first phone running the open-source Tizen operating system sometime in 2013.
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Android
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Want to see more of the Huawei Ascend Mate? The device, a massive 6.1 inch black slab phone, has leaked out some more photos, just ahead of its expected unveiling at CES. In these photos, we’re also seeing another device we’re hoping to see unveiled, the 5 inch D2.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It’s been a year and a half since HP stopped selling phones and tablets running the webOS operating system. But since then HP has transitioned webOS into an open source operating system and we’ve seen early builds ported to existing devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone and Asus Transformer Pad tablet.
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Welcome to The H’s look back at 2012. We’ve broken down the events of the year by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say “Meh”. From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source software to the worst mis-steps in the community.
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Why is the founder and former president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe currently leading a for-profit software company in the groupware space?
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Open Sauce appears to be a major victor of the Arab Spring which led to a change of leadership in Egypt.
It appears that the nation which worked out how to build the world’s largest public building with just copper tools, has decided that proprietary software is a bad thing.
Egypt is apparently drawing up plans to cast out the Voles, Oracles, Apples and other followers of Apep, into the Lands of the West in favour of a decent open sauce plan for its public software projects.
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Events
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There are three new books about free software thanks to Google’s 2012 Summer of Code Documentation Camp. The week-long event started off with an unconference, but the main objective was for each participating project to produce a cohesive, book-length work of documentation. All three projects delivered, and thanks to the arrangement made by FLOSSManuals with a local printer, 30 copies of each book were in print late Friday evening. FLOSSManuals has the sprint process down to a science, which is good news for open projects of all stripes, but it is still feeling out how best to sustain the sprint’s energy after the participants part company.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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No one needs an introduction to Mozilla. Yes, the makers of the Firefox internet browser. For years, Mozilla has been encouraging open web standards, trying to promote the web as a platform for all. And with the advent of HTML5 things have gotten much simpler with almost everything being able to be implemented in web. With HTML5, developers would no longer have to worry about creating applications intended for cross platform usage – if based on web-standards, it runs on any platform with a standard compliant browser! Building apps is quite easy as well.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Cloud Computing is new age technology and I doubt their are anyone in technology domain not talking about it. I have added list of 5 cloud application, software one should watch for 2013.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Business
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I’ve been writing about Open Source eCommerce (OSC) shopping carts for a decade now, and many carts have risen and fallen in popularity during that time. For the past five years I’ve tracked the popularity of OSC carts every month by doing an exact Google search and recording the results. This doesn’t track the actual number of carts installed, and popularity can be positive or negative, but over time it becomes more and more valuable as the search results mirror the life cycle of a cart. Carts that are becoming more popular show rapid increases in the number of search results. It is possible to see exact the month a cart peaks in popularity. Year-to-year results are even more revealing.
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Funding
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BSD
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The FreeBSD project has now officially released version 9.1 of the BSD Unix derived operating system. At the same time, the project’s 2012 fund raising initiative blew past its $500,000 goal and is currently sitting at $684,905 raised; over $250,000 of that appears to have come from an anonymous donor.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Version 0.4.0 of the Simon open-source speech recognition system has been released. This release, which represents years of development, brings many improvements.
Simon 0.4.0 for speech recognition brings a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system, and much more. The main user-interface of Simon has also been reworked for improved usability.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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Shanshan Zhou had a longtime childhood fantasy: she dreamt her otherwise static belongings would suddenly begin to play with her—she used to pretend they were alive. So when it came time to do a project for her Physical Computing class at Victoria University-Wellington, she took the opportunity to turn an inanimate object into “living art.” Zhou gave character to an object which, despite its lack of human features, could now connect with people.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has said that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.
Although this new stable version is not yet a W3C standard, it has been called “feature complete” a this stage.
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William J. Baer was confirmed by the Senate on Sunday as the government’s top antitrust lawyer, placing him in charge of the Justice Department division that reviews corporate mergers and prosecutes price-fixing cases.
Amid the heated negotiations to reach an agreement to head off large tax increases and vast spending cuts in the new year, the Senate voted 64 to 26 in favor of Mr. Baer, a prominent antitrust lawyer at the law firm Arnold & Porter.
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Health/Nutrition
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Drug dealers have redefined the term “shooting up”.
Smugglers are shooting their supplies across the American border – by cannon.
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Security
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Files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and provided to CNET show that the National Security Agency (NSA) under its secret Perfect Citizen program is looking at the computerized systems that control large-scale utilities, checking for vulnerabilities including power grid and gas pipeline controllers. The U.S. government relies on commercial utilities for electricity, telecommunications, and other infrastructure requirements The program seeks to carry out “vulnerability exploration and research” against computerized controllers involved in these utilities.
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In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.
Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.
Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A non-profit government watchdog has sued the Central Intelligence Agency to uncover information about its controversial collaboration with the New York City Police Department’s counter-terrorism surveillance program. The suit, filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Dec. 20, seeks to force the release of a report by the agency’s inspector general into whether it violated legal prohibitions against spying on American soil. In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the agency was deeply involved in training the NYPD’s Intelligence Unit, which spied on Muslims in New York even when there was no evidence they had committed any crimes.
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A Pakistani man whose father was killed by a US drone strike is to appeal a judgement in a case seeking to determine the legality of intelligence sharing in relation to GCHQ assistance in CIA drone strikes.
Noor Khan – whose father was killed in a CIA strike on a peaceful meeting in March 2011 –issued legal proceedings in March of this year against the Foreign Secretary in order to clarify the British Government’s reported policy of supporting the CIA’s covert campaign of attacks on his home region of Waziristan, using remotely-controlled robotic aircraft.
Supported by legal action charity Reprieve and solicitors Leigh Day & Co, Mr Khan’s legal challenge asserts that this practice are illegal. British law makes it clear that in these circumstances UK intelligence staff and those who direct their actions could be committing various criminal offences, including conspiracy to murder.
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The rapid advance of drone technology has sparked interest by police and sheriff offices in acquiring drones. This new eagerness of many nonfederal law enforcement agencies to acquire drones has been also closely nurtured by the federal government.
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Although 2012 saw an accelerating drawdown of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) forces in Afghanistan, a grim aspect of that decade-long war—reliance on air strikes by unmanned drones—continued unabated. Indeed, those attacks were stepped up, with America’s use of drone warfare in Pakistan reaching an unprecedented height over the past year. With President Barack Obama re-elected and no longer facing the pressure of a campaign, it would be in America’s interest—and certainly in the interests of my country, Pakistan—to use the first year of his new term to de-escalate the violence.
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Egyptian prosecutors launched an investigation on Tuesday against a popular television satirist for allegedly insulting the president in the latest case raised by Islamist lawyers against outspoken media personalities.
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Cablegate
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The final Green Left Report for 2012 features Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange, on why the Australian government fears WikiLeaks, the problems of the corporate press, and the WikiLeaks releases that impacted the most on her.
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The man’s name and date of birth correspond with that given for one person in a secret 2010 cable sent by the US embassy in Canberra, detailing people to be added to the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database. However, his family deny he was a member of any extremist group.
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Because of Julian Assange’s effort, the world knows that heroic Ethiopians such as Andualem Aragie, Eskindir Nega, Reeyot Alemu, Woubshet Taye, and countless others are languishing in jail after being falsely accused of terrorism by a regime that is bankrolled by the U.S. Government and the European Union, and assisted by China.
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Finance
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Many Americans understood that the Dodd-Frank “reforms” were mostly worthless. They will not prevent another crisis or another massive TARP type bailout as the law did absolutely nothing about Too Big To Fail banks (which have actually gotten bigger).
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Massachusetts’ top securities regulator, William Galvin, charged on Monday that a top Morgan Stanley banker had improperly coached Facebook on how to disclose sensitive financial information selectively, perpetuating what he calls “an unlevel playing field” between Wall Street and Main Street.
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1. It’s not a cliff.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As Americans experienced epic droughts, freakish hurricanes, and other extreme weather over the past few years, many are eager to see our nation secure a sustainable energy supply for the future that won’t break our climate. But others – most notably the polluting fossil fuel industries – are eager to double down on the same old technologies that are responsible for the climate crisis in the first place.
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In short, John Boehner has committed himself to a set of principles for operating the House that makes the body fundamentally dysfunctional. A functional legislative body either needs a mechanism for the majority leader to get members of his caucus to toe the party line, or he needs the ability to “reach across the aisle” to get the votes he needs from the minority. John Boehner lacks the former, and by ruling out the latter he’s effectively painted himself into a corner where he might not be able to get any piece of “fiscal cliff” legislation passed by the full House of Representatives.
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Censorship
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Anyone following the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) over the last 36 hours knows this has become a moment of high drama around the International Telecommunications regulations (ITRs) and the role of the ITU for Internet related issues. Unfortunately, that is probably the only thing anyone can say for certain. Even the member states on the ground have expressed confusion on critical matters, such as whether the widely reported “vote” on a resolution that included express language relating to the Internet [was really a vote or not].
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“The good guys did not win—the terms are defined in such a way as to allow a significant amount of mischief in the Internet space,” Vint Cerf, the co-author of the TCP/IP protocol, and a founding father of the Internet itself, told Ars.
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Across his Administration, President Obama has taken bold steps advancing a digital environment that rewards innovation and empowers individuals the world over. These ideas, and the policies that support them, are cornerstones of America’s economy. But the benefits from this approach extend well beyond the United States; they are equally important to the social and economic wellbeing of Internet users across the globe. This is why the United States is strongly represented at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) treaty conference in Dubai this month, where over 100 delegates from the public sector, private sector, and civil society are joining with our international partners to ensure the future of global, interoperable telecommunications networks.
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A former telecommunications policy maker at the international organization, which is holding talks in Dubai to expand regulation of the Internet, warns that the group’s conference is “absolutely absurd.”
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Internet pioneer Vint Cerf lashes out over the work being done by WCIT members in Dubai this week
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Most countries at a conference on telecommunications oversight agreed Wednesday that a United Nations agency should play an “active” but not dominant role in Internet governance as they struggled to reach a worldwide compromise.
As a marathon session at the UN’s World Conference on International Telecommunications concluded at about 1:30 a.m. local time in Dubai (2130 GMT), the chairman asked for a “feel of the room” and then noted that the nonbinding resolution had majority support, while denying it was a vote.
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Telecoms summit grinds to halt after China and Algeria object to human rights language, an interruption that follows a vote to give a U.N. agency a more “active” role in shaping the Internet.
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The United States is refusing to sign a telecom treaty at a UN gathering in Dubai because it opens the door to governmental regulation of the Internet, the US delegation chief said Thursday.
“The United States today announced it cannot sign (the treaty regulations) in their current form,” Terry Kramer, head of the US delegation to the World Conference on International Telecommunications, said in a teleconference from Dubai.
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Privacy
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A Missouri lawmaker is seeking to limit the use of drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles. The legislation would require law enforcement officers get a warrant before using a drone in Missouri.
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Six years after a spying scandal rocked Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the boardroom caper came to a quiet close in a federal courtroom Thursday when a former private investigator was sentenced to three months in prison for his role in the pretexting scheme.
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A class action lawsuit against Instagram has been filed in San Francisco federal court, following user outrage regarding the mobile photo sharing app’s changed Terms of Service.
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Civil Rights
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President Barack Obama has signed into law a five-year extension of the U.S. government’s authority to monitor the overseas activity of suspected foreign spies and terrorists.
The warrantless intercept program would have expired at the end of 2012 without the president’s approval. The renewal bill won final passage in the Senate on Friday.
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The idea of watchful drones buzzing overhead like Orwellian gnats may seem far-fetched to some. But Congress, in its enthusiasm for a new industry, should guarantee the strongest protection of privacy under what promises to be a galaxy of new eyes in the sky.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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China has tightened its rules on internet usage to enforce a previous requirement that users fully identify themselves to service providers.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Corporate Education Reform hurts children. This truth needs to be said a million times over. No longer can we allow reformers to hide behind the rhetoric of reform and ignore the realities. Words like “poverty is not destiny” “high expectations” “quality school options” and “choice” all mask the very real impact of these reforms. There are consequences to the disruption of school closings, to purposeful disinvestment in neighborhood schools, to layoffs of experienced educators, to the haphazard expansion of largely low-quality charters.
As most who read this blog know, I work in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. Unlike many teachers out there who see only their small window of the reform world, I get to see the cross-section. Students cycle through my program so quickly (too quickly, thanks to massive cuts in mental health services) that I hear dozens of stories a week from all over the city and surrounding suburbs. And what’s happening out there is beyond heart-breaking, it is wrong. Kids have come in to the hospital with massive anxiety, depression, and aggression related, in part, to school policies. I have students who report fear of “getting jumped” on the way to schools across town after their neighborhood school was shut down. I’ve had kids with school refusal due to the very real fear of a dangerous bus route through rival neighborhoods. Young people are afraid of the increases in violence and gang activity as kids from all parts of the city are thrust together in schools whose only response to the rage is zero tolerance lockdown. There is no healing, just ignoring and punishing the problem, pushing the fights off of school grounds. Almost every child I work with from the neighborhoods targeted for the brunt of school reform has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They have difficulty sitting still, are quick to react to any perceived threat with violence or aggression, cannot concentrate on school work, and have come to hate the experience of school. And yet all they get from school leadership is school closures, fired teachers, and false choices.
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A few weeks ago, we asked for your help to identify patent applications that threaten to stifle innovation in the 3D printing community. Now more than ever, it’s critical to make sure the free and open source community and others who work in the space have freedom to operate and to continue to innovate.
With your help, we have identified a lineup of top-priority patent applications that seem both overly-broad and dangerous to the free and open source community. Now it’s time to find proof that these patent applicants do not deserve the monopolies they are asking for: that what they are trying to patent was known or was obvious before the patent was filed.
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Copyrights
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Kim Doctom could fill his own Year in Review list for 2012. The Megaupload mega-personality planned a cloud music service called Megabox. He unveiled a new domain, Me.ga, only to lose it in a preemptive strike by the African nation of Gabon. There were even rap songs and accusations against Joe Biden.
But hanging over all that was Dotcom’s ongoing soap opera in New Zealand. On January 20, 2012, 76 police officers raided Dotcom’s mansion on behalf of the US and took him into custody for extradition to face charges of racketeering, money-laundering, and copyright infringement. Twelve months later, the legal woes aren’t over, and Megaupload remains down… but Dotcom is being invited to ceremonially turn on Christmas lights in the country.
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Given recent reports that a Montreal-based company has captured data on one million Canadians who it says have engaged in unauthorized file sharing, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before widespread file sharing lawsuits came to Canada. It now appears that those lawsuits are one step closer as TekSavvy, a leading independent ISP, has announced that it has received a motion seeking the names and contact information of thousands of customers (legal documents here). To TekSavvy’s credit, the company insists that it will not provide subscriber information without a court order and it has sent notices to affected customers.
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The MPAA is still not happy with Google’s efforts to reduce online piracy and says that the search giant continues to facilitate a “staggering amount of copyright infringement.” For their part Google is warning policymakers of the damaging effects the recent surge of DMCA takedown requests is having on the flow of information online. Both Google and the MPAA agree that the current DMCA takedown procedures are not ideal, but the solutions both parties have in mind are quite different.
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A court in China has ordered Apple to pay compensation to eight Chinese writers and two companies for violating their copyrights.
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Posted in Patents at 2:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
16th century painting of a civil law notary
Summary: Scientists, engineers, programmers, technologists etc. — not government bodies — will help the rest of the public abolish government-granted monopolies
The European Commission doesn't get FRAND, or maybe it pretends not to, or perhaps it was bribed or deceived by Apple and Microsoft lobbyists. Either way, this recent event proved some malice in today’s Commission, which also ushered in the unitary patent. Glyn Moody writes on the subject:
There was – of course – disagreement on the place of FRAND, since those in the open source world know that it has none if the object is to produce a level playing-field for all to compete on equally. And for that very reason those in the world of proprietary software want FRAND baked into standards since it excludes nearly all of the key open source licences and the projects using them. It’s the perfect solution for those who are afraid to compete fairly: skew the rules so that open source is excluded, and then claim victory when it doesn’t offer solutions.
Also worth noting in the above statement from the report is the claim that “the distinction between software and hardware is increasingly artificial”. I think if we decode this, what it means is that in the old world of hardware – for example, in telecommunications or codecs – FRAND standards were common, and that’s perfectly true. But in the world of software, the key modern forums for standards such as W3C or OASIS require RF, not FRAND. So this is a crude attempt to force old-fashioned hardware approaches on modern software, because once again the convenient result is that open source is excluded.
Indeed, given the manifestly greater success of the modern approach – as demonstrated by the unprecedented rate of growth of the Internet ecosystem compared to earlier technologies – the move to implementing hardware features in software is a strong argument for making older hardware standards RF instead of FRAND; that would allow them to enjoy the same kind of accelerated deployment the software world has experienced in the last two decades.
Thus there is no “dilemma” that needs resolving, and no need for stakeholder dialogue – another code term for “opportunity for wealthy US software companies to spend huge sums lobbying for what they want in the corridors of Brussels,” since “stakeholders” never seems to include groups representing the public interest, who were similarly excluded from the ACTA negotiations until they took to the streets across Europe.
Even Kroes lost her way when it comes to patents as she gave implicit consent to FRAND [1, 2, 3]. These career politicians are typically lawyers by trade, so the poor comprehension of scientists’ desire is not surprising. See what IBM’s Kappos says to provide ammo to a lawyers’ firm after he had joined the USPTO and later announced that he would leave amid public scolding [1, 2, 3]:
USPTO Director Discusses Software “Patent Wars” By: Sheldon Mak & Anderson http://www.eyeonip.net/David Kappos, the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, recently addressed the socalled “patent wars” impacting the software industry. Although he acknowledged several concerns about patent quality, he also highlighted the importance of IP rights to the software industry. “Patent protection is every bit as well-deserved for software-implemented innovation as for the innovations that enabled man to fly, and before that for the innovations that enabled man to light the dark with electricity, and before that for the innovations that enabled the industrial revolution,” Kappos stated. However, he also acknowledged that patent protection must be “properly tailored in scope, so that programmers can write code and engineers can design devices without fear of unfounded accusations of infringement.” Kappos also debunked reports that the “patent wars” between companies like Samsung and Apple signal that the system is broken. He cited a USPTO study that found that in over 80 percent of the smartphone lawsuits, the courts have construed the software patents at issue as valid. He further noted that rejections in software patent applications taken to the USPTO appeals board are upheld at a slightly higher rate than for the office as a whole, and those few decisions appealed to the Federal Circuit are affirmed 95 percent of the time. Kappos also noted that the changes implemented under the America Invents Act should improve the quality of software patents. He specifically listed new procedures, such as post-grant opposition, inter partes review, and covered business method patents review. He also noted that additional changes are forthcoming as the USPTO completes the rollout of the AIA. “So to the commentators declaring the system is “broken” I say: give it a rest already, and give the AIA a chance to work. Give it a chance to even get started. But we’re not done. Not nearly,” Kappos stated.
We already shared some rebuttals to this. The conclusion we can reach is that too many government bodies are occupied by lawyers who represent corporations (not people) and it shows. Groups that are led by lawyers do not want to solve the problem from which they profit. █
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Posted in Africa, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 1:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft colludes with dubious officials in order to pass a lot of public money to crooks who habitually misuse their power over code
The Egyptians seem to have learned from their neighbour Tunisia [1, 2, 3] and given that Microsoft and Gates Foundation actively work to occupy Egypt they should keep their eyes open. This week they rise up against a Microsoft deal that discriminates against software fostered by local developers for autonomy and freedom. To quote one report:
A group of organisations, companies and high-profile individuals have released a statement calling for a protest on Sunday in front of the Cabinet in Cairo, in response to a recent government decision to purchase Microsoft software licenses and products to upgrade government agencies. Under the name Open Egypt, the signees demand the government re-evaluate their deal.
At a cost of more than 43 million dollars, activists such as Abdel Rahman Mansour from the We are all Khaled Sayeed and human rights’ organisations such as the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights say it is a waste of money, considering the availability of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and Egypt’s current economic state.
Indeed, the use of FOSS is seen as the more strategic option, as it allows the government to invest that money elsewhere and with the added benefit of utilising existing FOSS software already operating in many agencies.
So the rule by puppets may remain after Mubarak was toppled. The North Americans can control Egypt through software, just as Vodafone did through networks. Here is another article on this matter:
Egypt: The People Demand Free and Open Source Software
[...]
Things did not stop here, but members of the Open Source community in Egypt called for a silent demonstration in front of the cabinet of ministers on the 30th of December. Other demonstrations are also being arranged in different parts of Egypt. And the hashtag #OpenEgypt is now being used to introduce people to Open Source Software, and their benefits.
We covered many such stories from different nations in prior years. The plot always repeated itself and rarely did we see the public rising up in opposition. So well done, people of Egypt, fight the good fight and show the rest of the world how it’s done. One reader sent us this link (Arabic with translation) an hour ago. It seems like the protests are paying off! █
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