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01.06.13

Public Radio International One of the Latest Media Outlets to be Bribed by Bill Gates for Whitewash, Lobbying, and Propaganda

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Marketing at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Felons buy a “hero” status

Microsoft Jack

Summary: Bill Gates just got $7,000,000,000 richer (in 2012) while the press he had paid portrayed him as a generous giver

I generally still cover the Gates Foundation, but I do so mostly in Identi.ca due to lack of time (dents are short). This news report merits special attention because it helps keep track of future mouthpieces for Bill Gates:

The BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION has given a two-year, $1.6 million grant to PUBLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL. The funding is intended for a “major initiative to raise awareness, understanding and engagement around critical issues of health and development worldwide,” according to a press release from PRI, which is including the reporting from the project on its syndicated public radio show “PRI’S THE WORLD.” The GATES FOUNDATION has been supporting initiatives at PRI since 2004.

Just like The Guardian, BBC [1, 2, 3], PBS and many others, the bribe or sellout is described euphemistically. Smart people can see through it. It is estimated that Gates spends a million dollars a day just buying the press, i.e. assuring favourable coverage of his agenda. In other news, Gates got seven billion dollars richer last year. So much for “giving away” his wealth. He has a tax-exempt investment company because he paints it “charity”. Buying the press to manufacture consent? That’s just slush funds to him. It’s part of the business model of the Rockefellers, too. █

USPTO Denies the Option of Eliminating Software Patents and Other Controversial Patents

Posted in America, Patents at 8:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Java logo

Summary: Fake choice offered by the USPTO in another meaningless public consultation

The farcical USPTO deals with “swpat [shorthand for software patents] and functional claims,” says one FFII person about this USPTO hearing. Henrion, the FFII’s president, says in response that the “USPTO already set the agenda here, substantive patent law is off topic.” He is right.

As we noted the other day, quantity over quality is the implicit motto at the Office. They get more money for lowering the bar. So many comments were posted regarding reports like this one, probably in vain (the USPTO is an echo chamber, with strong resistance to facts and public will):

In an announcement yesterday in the Federal Register the US Patent and Trademark Office invited the public to participate in a “software partnership” next month to “enhance the quality of software-related patents.”

Their very existence is a problem, not their “quality”. Neil McAllister, who now writes for the British press, says that “US Patent Office seeks public input on software patents’ future”. To quote the body of his article: “The agency says it would like input from software developers and the public as to what level of detail and specificity should be required in a software patent application to meet the definition of a “quality” patent – that is, one that clearly states what is covered.”

“This is a good example of rigged debates, where the option of banning software patents does not even exist (akin to Republicans vs. Democrats debates where the important issues are totally off the table).”This is a good example of rigged debates, where the option of banning software patents does not even exist (akin to Republicans vs. Democrats debates where the important issues are totally off the table). Pamela Jones wrote about this too. Yes, legal folks too realise this and regarding a piece from Julie Samuels (at a pro-patents site), Pamela Jones writes: “This is very sensible except for one thing, and it’s like a pimple on the nose. Algorithms are mathematics. Period. Mathematics are not supposed to be patentable subject matter. Thus, this suggestion works against helping the courts to understand that simple and unchangeable truth, dividing the question instead into “good” patentable mathematics versus “bad” and unpatentable mathematics. And over time, you will regret endorsing patentable math.”

Here is a US company arguing against the notion that abstract ideas and principles should be patentable:

San Francisco online real estate company Trulia has filed its initial response to Zillow’s patent lawsuit, arguing that the case should be dismissed because the business method in question — Zillow’s online home valuation tool known as the Zestimate — is not patentable.

How about design and shape patents as they are described in here:

Stockton says design patents also pack more of a damages punch than regular patents because, if they are infringed, a court must award damages based on the value of the whole invention — not just a patented feature.

It looks like sooner or later companies and people will rebel against the USPTO, whose main function became to serve trolls, lawyers, and monopolists (multinationals). Remember the rounded rectangles which Apple claims to ‘own’? How does monopolising it improve anything? Appearance should not be patentable. Sometimes even the multinationals suffer (turf wars), as seen here in the news:

While lots of folks have been declaring the 3D movie obsession dead for a while now, the studios still love 3D movies. In this age where they’re looking for ways to create formulaic premium experiences that get people to go out to the theaters, they seem to have jumped on the 3D bandwagon full force. Of course, as with all things Hollywood embraces too strongly, that’s now leading to backlash, mainly because rather than do it well and where it makes sense, the big studios are basically just looking to add 3D to whatever they can and hope people will pay the premium. It’s a short term strategy, but Hollywood execs aren’t exactly known for their long term outlooks.

…Or even the benefit to the public. The bottom line is, patents make society far worse off.

Linus Torvalds once said: “People disagree with me. I just ignore them.” Patent lawyers, including the USPTO, are pretty much the same. So it’s time to get more assertive in fighting them. They’re not listening anyway. They deflect criticism using various means and PR instruments; the latest hearing is one such instrument. █

Apple Has Always Been Shameless About Lying on Innovation

Posted in Apple, Patents at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Not producing, not innovating

Summary: How Apple uses the plutocratic and bureaucratic US system to discriminate against and block Asian brands that it actually imitated

Branding giant Apple is not innovative where it claims innovation. It’s all just marketing. It takes determination to show this technically and patent re-examination is where the victim of a bad decision of USPTO along with aggression from the applicant puts the burden of proper examination on the victim, who then needs to spend money accumulating proof of prior art or pay lawyers to explain triviality etc. In simpler terms, it’s only when bogus patents get weaponised that we find out how bogus they really are. This makes USPTO a corruptible, SLAPP-like tool (damaging too) where all the burden of proof is put on victims, including smaller players such as the Taiwan-based HTC. One prominent lawyer says:

Apple should be forced to release its settlement with HTC now, in uncensored, unredacted form. Full disclosure should be the norm in patent lawsuits between competitors. If transparency means that tech companies, fearful of having to disclose their financial secrets, refrain from initiating new patent litigation, well, so much the better.

Samsung, unlike HTC, has a lot of patents and a pro-Apple site says it retaliates to deter Apple (which started this patent war):

According to a South Korean news site, Samsung has launched a patent-infringement lawsuit in Korea against Apple over the iOS version of Notification Center, saying it violates their patent. The feature, which debuted almost two years ago, is also similar (but not identical) to an Android feature called Status Bar for which Google recently received a US patent. Apple most recently brought the Notification Center over to the Mac in OS X Mountain Lion.

Due to court discrimination (nationalism in the press and in government agencies like the US ITC), Samsung is going out of the US for deterrence. Apple, the original aggressor in the turf wars, keeps blackmailing with lawsuits in the US:

iPhone maker withdraws infringement allegations in exchange for assurances that Samsung will not market the smartphone in the U.S.

Remember that Apple originally ripped off east Asian companies. As this news reminder goes:

Above you’ll see a rather drab (by today’s standards) looking machine tagged with the name “Apple Snow White 1 Sony Style” from 1982. Of this design Esslinger writes, “Concept 1 was defined by ‘what sony would do if it built computers’. I didn’t like this idea, as it could create conflicts with Sony, but Steve insisted. He felt that sony’s simple cool design language should be a good benchmark, and Sony was the current pacesetter in making high-tech consumer products smarter, smaller and more portable.”

“And now Apple sues Samsung,” writes Pamela Jones, noting the obvious. █

“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

–Steve Jobs

FRAND is Fraud, Anticompetitive

Posted in Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 7:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Taxing through so-called ‘standards’ that are thorny

Thorn

Summary: Why all FRAND — in practical Microsoft’s and Apple’s — is not acceptable and must be rethought, abolished

Microsoft found a friendly setting in its back yard, Seattle, never mind the reality of the situation. Microsoft abuses FRAND terms, but it’s only Motorola that gets punished in Seattle. Double standards much? As Pamela Jones put it:

Motorola has now filed with the US District Court in Seattle its Post-Trial Brief, on the topic of what it feels Microsoft should pay for its use of Motorola’s RAND patents. Microsoft has filed its brief [PDF] as well. Both sides have also filed their proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law. Here’s Motorola’s (168 pages) and here is Microsoft’s (139 pages), both PDFs.

“This talk reveals how silly the FRAND disputes are,” writes Jones about Rob Reid’s TED talk. “Even if you could reduce the price of all FRAND patents, you still couldn’t afford to build a phone if every patent owner got a cut. The complainers about FRAND patent royalties want an edge, so their utility patents cost more and Android vendors with FRAND patents are left at a distinct disadvantage.”

As noted in our daily links, the FTC decided to back away from Google, despite Microsoft lobbying. It’s not just about search; it is also about patents:

US v. Google is not going to be the tech trial of the decade. Today the government has wrapped up a wide-ranging investigation of the search giant’s practices in both its core search business, and its use of standards-based patents. No major charges will be brought.

They mean standard-essential patents and refer vaguely to FRAND. Apple and Microsoft hypocritically complain about FRAND and try using this talking point against Google, even though it’s Apple and Microsoft that abuse FRAND the most, not Motorola. An article composed by Andy Updegrove says more about it.

FRAND as a whole should be banned. The problem is when retaliatory legal action is selective applied, as in Seattle. There is a lot of nationalism/xenophobia and nepotism at play. We’ll deal with that in the next post again. █

Vista 8 Worse Than Vista, So Microsoft Must Block Competition to Save Windows

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista, Vista 8, Windows at 7:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Dead-end company

Summary: More UEFI stories and some numbers which show even Vista outpacing Vista 8 in terms of adoption

WE are looking for more UEFI stories as part of an attempt to show how anticompetitive it really is.

Jamie Watson, a Brit, experienced yet more problems when he tested distributions on new hardware which is improperly marked:

I’ve been trying to set up multi-booting with Windows 8 and Linux – with limited success.

[...]

I have a difficult time even finding out from the pre-sales technical information if a system has EFI boot or not, much less whether it is configurable or not.

Here is another new story about UEFI issues. It sure looks like Microsoft is eager to prevent Linux and GNU from gaining ground by persuading hardware makers to restrict what can be booted. There is no denying the fact that Vista 8 is a failure, worse even than Vista based on some new numbers that are charted here:

Windows 8 usage uptake has slipped behind Vista’s in the same point in its release. Windows 8 online usage share is around 1.6% of all Windows PC’s which is less than the 2.2% share that Windows Vista commanded at the same two month mark after release.

The source of this data is moreover close to Microsoft (and partly funded by it). We wrote about it in:

When even a Microsoft booster is saying negative things about Vista 8 adoption, then you know if might even be worse than claimed and reported. But what seems to be under-reported is the degree to which Microsoft is screwing with GNU/Linux installations. That needs to change. █

“We all know Linux is great… it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.” -Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amterdam Linux Symposium

01.05.13

Links 5/1/2013: Fedora 18 Delayed; Civil Rights Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Netflix makes cloud Janitor Monkey open source

    Netflix, the popular online video service that makes extensive use of public-cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has made code for one of the tools it developed to make its cloud-using life easier open source.

    Netflix developers built Janitor Monkey to automate clean-up of unused cloud resources, such as virtual-machine (VM) instances and cloud-storage volumes, or “Elastic Block Storage” (EBS) volumes in AWS parlance.

  • Another Satisfied Customer of FLOSS

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • A simulated FirefoxOS experience

        Your editor has frequently written that, while Android is a great system that has been highly beneficial to the cause of open mobile devices, it would be awfully nice to have a viable, free-software alternative. Every month that goes by makes it harder for any such alternative system to establish itself in the market, but that does not keep people from trying. One of the more interesting developments on the horizon has been FirefoxOS — formerly known as Boot2Gecko — a system under development at Mozilla. In the absence of any available hardware running this system, the recent 1.0 release of the FirefoxOS simulator seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for what the Mozilla folks are up to.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OPENNEBULA 2012: YEAR IN REVIE

      Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.
      As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

  • Licensing

    • Different Software Licenses

      There are times where one might be inclined to use a different license, e.g. the BSD license or even a license similar to the openmotif license. At least that’s the theory since what I really did was release source code with no license mentioned at all, kind of an ad hoc free/open software release. So I’m going to mellow a bit and say if someone wants to use a different but still open/free type license then I’ll accept that and not argue about it.

Leftovers

  • Why I Hate Microsoft

    It’s still not time to treat M$ as a normal business. They don’t yet work for a living, making $hundreds of thousands per employee per annum doing little more than shipping licensing agreements to OEMs. Certainly their OS is not worth what people are paying for it and M$ still attacks other businesses, most recently spreading FUD about Google at FTC, which dropped the matter after Google agreed to make a few changes. Google makes far more per employee per annum but they do work for it making huge server-farms do much of the work. That’s smart and does not harm competition. It’s time the rest of the world became smarter and dropped M$ as a “partner” in anything.

  • Journalism Is Not Narcissism

    Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation’s college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.

  • Italian authorities fine Apple another $264K over product warranties

    Apple’s changes to its product warranty policies in Italy have been enough to satisfy investigators, but not before the company was slapped with one final fine totaling $264,000.

  • Apple Must Pay Chinese Authors for Copyright Infringement
  • Google Muscles in on Microsoft’s Turf

    Google is muscling in on Microsoft ’s turf as it wins over more business customers with its cloud-based software.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell ship wreck debacle

      Shell has admitted that the Kulluks generators are wrecked. The weather forecast for today is strong winds and high seas.

  • Finance


    • Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness

      At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an “analysis” that essentially concluded that Countrywide’s loans weren’t any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide’s underwriting.

    • What is behind the US fiscal cliff standoff?

      The phrase ‘fiscal cliff’ invokes images of an economy spiralling to the bottom.

      It was that image that was supposed to force politicians on Capitol Hill to work together to avoid the simultaneous expiration of tax cuts as well as the implementation of deep spending cuts.

    • Fiscal Cliff Follies: Political Theater Distracts From Key Problems With the Fix

      Extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income continue to enable the richest and largest individuals and enterprises to manipulate the economy and control the political parties. The result is an economic structure disinterested in a democratically focused way out of crisis and decline.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Perks of Being an American

      In the final days of the 112th Congress, President Obama signed two last minute bills. Both were extensions of highly controversial Bush-era policies. Both were scheduled to expire January 1, 2013. And both owe their passage largely to calamitous predictions that the sky would fall if they weren’t reauthorized in time.

    • Lawyers For The One Case Where There’s Proof Of Warrantless Wiretapping Decide Not To Appeal To Supreme Court

      Now, the lawyers representing Al-Haramain have decided that they will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, on the belief that the “current composition” of the court works against them. In other words, they believe that the current Justices on the court would side with the appeals court in rejecting their case, and then that would be precedent across the country (unless Congress changed the law, which it’s unlikely to do). The “hope” then is that somehow, down the road, someone else somehow gets evidence that they, too, were spied upon without a warrant, and it happens in a different district, and (hopefully) that circuit’s appeals court rules differently, setting up a circuit split. Oh, and that by the time that happens, the “composition” of the court shifts enough that the court actually respects the 4th Amendment. In other words: none of this is likely. Instead, the feds retain their ability to spy on people without warrants in direct violation of the 4th Amendment.

    • DHS TO PICK UP $6 BILLION TAB FOR CYBER SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS AT EVERY DEPARTMENT

      The Homeland Security Department is footing a potentially $6 billion bill to provide civilian agencies with the technology and expertise needed for near real-time threat detection, DHS officials said this week. The White House has demanded so-called continuous monitoring since 2010, but many agencies did not have the resources or know-how to initiate such surveillance.

    • Score one for the thicket

      WHILE everyone was watching the fiscal-cliff debacle, Congress and Barack Obama decided that they could still eavesdrop on Americans’ putatively private conversations without putting themselves to the trouble of obtaining a warrant.

    • The 2013 NDAA Signing Statement: No Better Than the 2012 Version
    • European Court orders damages for CIA torture victim

      In mid-December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg awarded damages of €60,000 to Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. The judges accepted that Macedonian security services had illegally seized El-Masri at the end of 2003, subjected him to abuse and finally handed him over to agents from the CIA.

    • Activist clear trash near NC CIA contractor’s base

      Stop Torture Now has committed to collect trash from the road outside the airport under the state’s “Adopt-a-Highway” program.

    • Obama may pick Pentagon, CIA heads next week

      President Barack Obama may round out his new national security leadership team next week, with a nomination for defense secretary expected and a pick to lead the CIA possible.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet”

      In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It’s a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.

    • REBUILDING THE WEB WE LOST

      We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I’ve been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It’s become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written and has inspired great responses.
      But the most important question we can ask is: How do we rebuild the positive aspects of the web we lost? There are a few starting points, building on conversations we’ve been having for years. Let’s look at the responsibilities we must accept if we’re going to return the web to the values that a generation of creators cared about.

    • China’s legislature adopts online info rules to protect privacy

      The decision bans service providers, as well as government agencies and their personnel, from leaking or damaging users’ digital information, as well as from selling or illegally providing this information to others.

    • China requires Internet users to register names
    • China closing Web loophole

      Michael Anti, a Beijing-based critic of Web censorship, believes the current pushback on the Web reflects paranoia over incoming President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on official corruption. Local officials could be pressuring propaganda departments to curb freedom of speech online, he said. “Officials hate the Internet,” Anti said. “They’re afraid of being victims of the anti-corruption campaign.

    • China’s New Internet Law Legalizes Deletion of “Illegal” Content, Bad News for Sina Weibo

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Tough Times for Trolls and their “Copyright Negligence” Scheme

        Despite at least five smackdowns by federal judges, copyright trolls are still accusing Internet subscribers of “negligently” allowing someone else to download porn films without paying. Last week, subpoena defense attorney Morgan Pietz fought back by asking the Northern California federal courts to put all of the open “negligence” cases filed by a prolific troll firm in front of a single judge – a judge who already ruled that the “negligence” theory is bogus.

01.04.13

Links 4/1/2013: Bodhi 2.2.0, Semplice Linux 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

Quantity Over Quality, or Why the US Permits Software Patenting

Posted in America, Asia, Patents at 4:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

China

Summary: Amid loss of edge in the innovative industries, a turn to patents is seen for PR and protectionism

The patent war is bound to get interesting now that the US loses its lead. The Economist says: “China’s patent office received more applications than any other country’s in 2011, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a UN body which follows 125 patent offices.”

Suffice to say, those numbers don’t means much, but they are used for vanity purposes. The US will try to pass off more ideas as patentable. The USPTO is trying to manufacture consent for software patents right now:

There is a notice in the Federal Register that the USPTO would like to form a partership with the software community to figure out how to “enhance” the quality of software patents.

The more patents the USPTO approves, the more “innovation” it will claim. Here is the government’s bad stance and a new case study against software patents:

Why Software Patents Should Be Banned: A Case Study

Joe Mullin provides us with the latest in the patent troll wars. Last year, a guy named Steven Vicinanza, the founder of BlueWave Computing, got a letter from Project Paperless LLC telling him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee because he uses networked scanners in his business:

That was Mother Jones.

Over at Bloomberg (plutocrats), the lawyers, or the 1% who are parasitical, have their say. To quote: “Clearly I didn’t ask enough patent attorneys for impressions of what’s going on in their corner of the cyberlaw world. There is a lot going on there. Complaints about how the patent system is impeding innovation, complaints about the complainers about the patent system, a new unified patent system in the European Union and a new court to keep things unified (that’s a lot of uniformity!), a new way of evaluating patents on business methods ushered in by the America Invents Act, and another big case in Federal Circuit involving a the patentability of computer software.”

Don’t ask patent lawyers. Ask real stake holders, people who actually produce something. █

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