08.12.11
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Novell, OIN, Oracle, Patents at 12:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Source
Summary: How the attacks on Android and on GNU/Linux merely bring large companies that compete against Microsoft even closer; another look at Apple’s abominable behaviour
Cisco joining the OIN is an important piece of news because of the scale of Cisco and Sean Michael Kerner claims, based on reliable sources, that Microsoft’s patent cartel (built in part with Novell and Nortel patents) is the driver of OIN’s growth:
The Open Invention Network (OIN) got its start in 2005 as an organization tasked with creating a patent commons to help Linux.
Over the years it has grown, and in the second quarter of 2011, the organization added 35 new member companies. That number is down from the 70 new members that the OIN added in the first quarter of the year.
As to why growth was faster in the first quarter, the reason has to do with an event that caused many organizations to consider their patent positions.
“The first quarter was somewhat extraordinary as there was the hangover from the Department of Justice’s investigation of the Novell patent sale,” Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network told InternetNews.com.
It is nice to see that the OIN recognises threat in Novell’s patents. We have warned about this for almost 5 years. CPTN includes Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft, all of which attack Android.
Groklaw tracks quite closely the Oracle case [1, 2, 3] and Lodsys cases, which also affect Android. Apple is meanwhile trying to embargo more Android tablets (Motorola’s), but Motorola is not too nervous because it has its own large patents arsenal, just like Samsung.
Apple’s aggression and embargo attempts were covered here before and these come under yet more scrutiny, even from OS News. To quote:
Earlier this week, we learned that Apple managed to get a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, barring it from being sold in the entire European Union – except for The Netherlands. The legal construct on which this injunction hinges was not a patent or trademark – it was something else entirely. It’s called a Community Design, was instated in 2002 and 2003, and, as I have learned, is far, far worse than anything the United States Patent and Trademark Office has ever come up with.
The Community Design was instated as part of Council Regulation No 6/2002. A Community Design is basically a trademark on the design of a product, whether it be software, hardware, or packaging. It is filed at the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), and once granted, is valid in the entire European Union. Initially it is valid for a period of five years, but it can be extended five times to reach a total of 25 years. Every member state has several Community Design courts, which are regular courts allowed to take on matters relating Community Designs. So far, nothing special.
Apple is meanwhile stacking up more patents it can attack with (e.g. touchscreen patents).
Murdoch’s press shows more prior art which weakens Apple’s story (this one is concrete, not some sci-fi from many decades ago) and more calls are made for resentment against Apple:
A huge win for anti-competitive practices, lawyers, and patent trolls.
A huge loss for consumers, choice in the market place, and free competition.
Muktware too has a string of strongly-worded posts, such as [1, 2]. One of these even breaches Godwin’s Law.
The bottom line is, those inside Microsoft’s cartel (notably Apple and Oracle) get some serious flak. They have become nasty and anti-competitive. █
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Posted in Site News at 12:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The German courts help validate some software patents right at the heart of Europe, despite lack of explicit consent from the EU
THE FFII’S Benjamin Henrion has taken note of the happenings in Germany and he claims that: “Software patents now validated in Germany, time for a new directive”
Germany recently took some steps that take us further from haven state for software developers. Falk Metzler, a proponent of software patents (he’s a patent lawyer), is among those who will benefit financially. To be fair, it’s not only lawyers who lobby for this; there are also some gullible journalists out there (Patel), but Timothy Lee rebut one of them with “Software Is Just Math. Really.” To quote his latest good article on this subject:
First, Patel makes the common argument that the patent system’s value comes from the way it encourages disclosure of useful technologies. This seems like an argument for software patents that could only be made by someone who’s never developed software (which Patel concedes he hasn’t). I’ve known and worked with a lot of computer programmers over the years in a lot of different parts of the software industry, and I’ve never met a computer programmer who finds patent filings a useful source of technical information. A typical patent is written in dense legalese. This style, combined with the tendency invent new terminology for standard concepts, makes searching the patent database almost impossible. Patents are often not released to the public until years after the original application, by which point the technologies described are often out of date. And most important, the typical patent has very few of the technical details a programmer would actually be interested in. Most importantly, the patent office doesn’t require the disclosure of source code.
Going back to the original subject, Germany helped Microsoft by allowing it to patent software relating to file systems. According to this new press release, Microsoft’s Finland-based partner Tuxera has just got another victim for its Microsoft-taxed ‘solution’. Microsoft's FAT patents in Germany help legitimise attacks even in EU-based companies such as TomTom (Holland) and also coming from Germany there is some new SUSE propaganda for Microsoft tax on GNU/Linux, in the form of a press release.
Why is Germany acting as Microsoft’s attack vector on Europe? It is truly disappointing. █
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Posted in Site News at 12:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why Techrights has been focused almost entirely on the issue of patents since its inception
THERE is a difference between covering what’s important and covering what gets more readers. Those two things are not the same (nor do they overlap), as tabloids clearly demonstrate. Techrights spent a lot of time covering Novell, which brought not so much traffic; but this issue was important. Novell was Microsoft’s pathway towards patent FUD, as tool for suppressing GNU/Linux adoption (now it is going after Java/Linux, or Android). But what bothers us a bit is extreme fascination with Ubuntu at the expense of other GNU/Linux distributions — something that has become somewhat less of an issue earlier this year because Ubuntu does not make it into the news so much anymore.
The only thing worse than the above trend (covering only one distribution) is the personification of operating systems. When GNU/Linux news becomes news about selected individuals, then the articles cease to be technical. They also become emotionally charged (people are mentally wired and good at hating people, not amorphous institutions). Having said that, if one is considered to be a “subjective” writer, this does not invalidate his or her opinion; it might actually be necessary in order to drive progress. “Balance” is hinged on the assumption that we must also cover and almost promote less civilised sides that are often outdated and seldom rational.
We often give credit to particular types of sites for driving everything forward. Phoronix, for example, is very good in that regard. Then there are some sites that produce detailed reviews, which are an invaluable (very valuable) service to the community and technical documentation/HOWTOs have their place too, although these are usually less like news items. Then there are pundits like SJVN, who do a whole mixture of things. But let us remember that Shuttleworth or Torvalds are not surrogates of GNU/Linux and to speak about their personal life as though it determines the success of Freedom is just plainly pointless. What we currently consider to be the #1 issue (for this particular area of IT) is software patents, so all of today’s posts will cover the subject as thoroughly as possible and provide a lot of external links for those who wish to know more.
Attaining the goal of software patents elimination is definitely achievable. Let us not be distracted by minor details that either affect one single person or one particular software package. Software patents can apply to all software and everyone who either develops or just buys products (and overpays). We can do something which actually matters to a lot of people rather than sink into the fringe of gossip. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another word of caution about the “Peer to Patent” effort in the United Kingdom
When the initiative known as “Peer to Patent” just stayed in the United States (the origin country) it did not make too much sense as the approach was not eliminating software patents; it ended up managing to legitimise them, or at least some of them (which it failed to stop or simply overlooked). According to this, we continue to see more evidence that the initiative spreading to the UK is not helping much [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. “The UK Intellectual Property Office has launched a pilot scheme to collect comments over the Internet on patent applications before they are granted,” says an official site.
“Peer to Patent belongs to a different strand with a different goal, funded largely by IBM (at least at the moment), a software patents proponent.”To quote one person from Twitter, Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, Peer to Patent allegedly “admits to allow #swpat when information is transferred more efficiently between processor and memory http://ur1.ca/4wbps”
We have written about this initiative many times before and based on what we see it still cannot be supported by abolishment proponents. In fact, unless it gets renamed “Peer NOT to Patent”, it will stay incompatible with the goal of groups like the FFII. Peer to Patent belongs to a different strand with a different goal, funded largely by IBM (at least at the moment), a software patents proponent. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 12:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The patent office which is more picky about what’s patentable and what is not scores better than the breeding ground of software patents and lobbyists for software patenting
THE president of the FFII, Benjamin Henrion, warns that according to this page, it is fair to say that the “EPO [is going] to organise propaganda meetings to explain people how to patent software in Europe”
A subject we have covered here many times before is the set of loopholes that the EPO leaves open to make software patenting more or less possible (just not formally). The more patents the EPO grants, the more ‘business’ it will have. So this system is primed for abuse. Having said that, it is nowhere as disastrous as the USPTO.
“The more patents the EPO grants, the more ‘business’ it will have.”To say more about the EU situation (not individual member nations), a lawyers’ blog criticises a study from Europe, saying that “it makes no sense to use surveys to compare how the different systems are doing on those metrics. So, for example, the report goes out of its way to emphasize how poorly the U.S. office is doing on timeliness as compared to the EU – 81% of respondents rate the EU well on timeliness but only 51% rate the US well. But why should we care about a survey on timeliness, when actual data is available? Although reasonable minds could differ on exactly what the right metric for timeliness is, how comparable the two systems are and what the optimal pendency time would be, it is easy to obtain reliable quantitative data on the existing situation. And the data show pretty definitively that however concerned the PTO and US patenters are about pendency time in the US, it is even longer in the EU (almost 50% longer in fact).”
Needless to say, this blog is American, so this apologism for the USPTO is very much guaranteed. What we might be able to conclude from the above is that the system with software patents and patent trolls is a lot less popular than that which does not encourage those, at least based on the aforementioned criteria. █
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Posted in Site News at 9:24 am by Guest Editorial Team
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Health/Nutrition
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No illnesses have been reported in the club’s 12-year history. And if a problem were to occur with the club’s food, members say, they would be able to quickly figure out the source. This was the second such raid on Rawesome, the first having happened in June of 2010.
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160,000 independent cattle producers in the past 15 years [have been driven out of business] … Most poultry processors operate under take it or leave it contracts … companies have retaliated against farmers that complain. … The survival of small and midsize family farms is essential for our access to more healthy, sustainable and local meat. … [exploitative rules favor] factory farms which practice environmentally damaging practices, animal cruelty, and the overuse of antibiotics.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminium, about a quarter of global reported inventories. … Also pushing aluminium costs higher are bank financing deals, which are estimated to have locked up about 70 percent of the 4.4 million tonnes of the metal sitting in LME-registered warehouses around the world.
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Anti-Trust
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This article is by a Microsoft booster but the announcement is inline with previous CEO statements and is the predictable shutdown of a major competitor. Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft has cost the company dearly
second quarter losses have widened to $523 million or a loss of 10 cents per share compared with a net income of $323 million or 9 cents per share in the prior-year quarter … operating income was approximately $556 million, down 41% year over year …
Even Gartner has a hard time sugar coating the results.
Nokia’s market share fell to 22% from 41% [in smart phones] … Overall, Nokia sold 97.9 million mobile devices in the second quarter, down from 111.47 million units a year earlier. Its overall market share fell to 22.8% from 30.3%. … Worldwide handset sales totaled 428.7 million units in the second quarter, up 16.5% from a year earlier. Smartphone sales grew much faster–by 74%–and accounted for a quarter all handset sales.
Where are Finland’s anti-trust regulators?
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Apple previously claimed to have blocked sales of the device in Australia.
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filing over a hundred lawsuits, each of which was followed up almost immediately with offers to settle at fees much cheaper than it would cost to fight, has the ‘indicia of extortion.’
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last week reversed a district court and reinstated a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) claim brought by an employer against a labor union for “bombarding” the computer systems of its sales and executive offices with emails and voicemails making it impossible for the company to communicate with its customers and vendors.
The employer’s problems are mostly self inflicted. They had an arbitrary limit on the number of emails any employee could have in their “inbox” and used Microsoft for service, which performs poorly at best. The court, however, found evidence of intentional computer damage because the union urged fired employees to “fight back”. If we followed the court’s logic, I’d be liable for damages if I asked readers to email the court and tell them that they are wrong and enough people agreed that it overwhelemed the court’s poorly configured mail server and the judge’s even poorer mail client. An HB Gary type company can easily abuse this ruling.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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[the Boston Consulting Group] bluntly praises Mississippi’s “flexible unions/workers, minimal wage growth, and high worker productivity,” estimating that in four years, workers in China’s fast-growing Yangtze River Delta will cost only 31 percent less than Mississippi workers. That’s before you figure in shipping, duties, and possible quality issues. Add it all up, says BCG, and “China will no longer be the default low-cost manufacturing location.” … Plenty of factory jobs in Northern states — even in the former high-wage stronghold of auto — are already “competitive.”
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Some people don’t even want to come out of their homes; some don’t even want to report crime. There’s a fear of being arrested; people are not driving. The kids are not even playing in the neighborhood. They’re targeting predominantly Latino areas. We hear about something happening every day. Some of our community leaders are getting calls three times a day about arrests. What is very astonishing is that the law hasn’t even gone into effect yet.
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[the Daily Show] painted the situation in Danville as an example of the U.S. turning into “Europe’s Mexico.” … IAM says Danville’s plant is the most dangerous furniture factory in the U.S., with 1,536 days lost from work due to injury since 2007.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It is clear to me that retail outlets in North America tend to comply with M$’s wishes when it comes to allowing real competition in operating systems on retail shelves. Here are some compelling evidences:
1. The standard argument is that retailers should supply what their customers want. Why is it that Walmart.com‘s customers want 70 books on Linux but only 2 PCs, and then only very low-end devices? That other OS finds 470 books and 426 computers. If 7:1 is the ratio of interest, should there not be 60 GNU/Linux PCs on those shelves?
2. If a customer wants Linux and searches BestBuy’s site they are given M$’s and Apple’s products to install their operating systems and nothing Linux-like at all.
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Desktop
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What we don’t have is the time to get the Linux live cd’s burned. Looks like we are going to need upwards of 50 for our immediate needs.
If you have time and the resources to help us burn these disks, we need to have these disks on hand within the next couple of weeks.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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While Mesa won’t have OpenGL 4.2 support for some time, NVIDIA released an OpenGL 4.2 preview driver on Monday as soon as the Khronos Group had published the new specification. AMD yesterday has now released a beta Linux driver (of their Catalyst blob, nothing to do with open-source) that provides OpenGL 4.2 support.
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With the release this week of the OpenGL 4.2 specification (and accompanying GL Shading Language 4.20 revision), the TODO list for the open-source Mesa developers just got a bit longer. Mesa / Gallium3D still lacks full support for OpenGL 3.0 and all of the revisions since that 2008 specification release.
The OpenGL 3.0 support in this open-source OpenGL library is slowly coming together (see the many Phoronix articles), but the GL Shading Language 1.30 support is incomplete along with other key areas. Some of the functionality is also limited “out of the box” due to patent / IP restrictions.
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Applications
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Here is a really fun, kid-friendly application that is not only great for taking notes in class, but it’s also an easy pdf annotator for filling out those fancy forms (college or employment applications) that expect you to fill in tiny little spaces with legible writing. Now when the teacher draws a diagram on the chalkboard and you need to copy it down, you can do it on your laptop or netbook instead of a piece of paper that can blow away when you drop your books (I’m clumsy and lose alot of stuff that way, lol) or get lost among all the other stuff you have to carry around in your backpack.
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Here’s a chance to show off your talent using a great drawing program made especially for kids. Tux Paint is an award-winning drawing program you can download to your computer. Tux Paint was recently awarded SourceForge.net Project of the Month. It will run on all versions of Windows (including Tablet PC), Mac OS X 10.4 and up, Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. And it’s FREE!
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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As usual, Desktop Summit 2011 has been a lot of fun. I’ve been to most of the GUADEC and aKademy free desktop events in the past few years, but this was the first time I didn’t give a talk. Even that way, it was definitely worth spending a week in Berlin.
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Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.
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One of the last talks I attended on Desktop Summit was “Swimming upstream or downstream? Both!”. Announced as speaker was Vincent Untz, but he didnt the talk alone, there was also Allison Randal, Harald Sitter and our own Jaroslav Řezník.In this talk came up the problem with the branding.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.
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In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest Artem Serebriyskiy introduces the new Nepomuk Web Extractor in a featured article. The list of changes include:
* Desktop layout control moves from pager to KWin
* OwnCloud gets instant search and sees many smaller commits which bring minor new features and work on the user interface
* An asynchronous Nepomuk resource retriever is implemented in KDE PIM to improve performance
* Rekonq receives a synchronisation feature
* Early version of Dolphin 2.0 comitted
* OpenVPN configuration import/export is now possible in Network Management
* Kate now supports local folding
* In Calligra there is work on caching and multiple bugfixes, Krita gets an update of undo support.
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I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.
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Wow, what a week! It’s just great to be at Desktop Summit again and meeting all those KDE people again and also the GNOME people which gives the event a different and pleasant touch.
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A couple of weeks ago I posted some information about the Department of Defense releasing its Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux distribution aimed at giving remote workers a more secure way to access government networks — but also available to the public for anyone’s use who wants a little extra security.
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New Releases
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Well ladies and gents we now have Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite. Please do not make this into what it is not. This is a lite edition made for computers with low resources. It is in no way even close to what the non lite Ultimate Edition 3.0 will be. This is specifically designed for computers with low resources IE notbooks etc. You can read more about that here.
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I am pleased to announce the release of ConnochaetOS 0.9.0. After one year of development and after three years after the last release of it’s predecessor DeLi Linux, this the first stable release of ConnochaetOS.
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Red Hat Family
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Linux is a godsend for many, including those obsessed about the professional breakup of Tiger Woods and former caddie Steve Williams.
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Gredenhag said reliability and suppot for XFS were key factors for selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was implemented on RHEL 5, which does not incorporate XFS per se, but Red Hat offered support for it as an option and CDW did the implementation of the feature. XFS — which is very fast file system for very large video files, such as 40 gigabyte files — is now in Red Hat Linux 6 and will eventually be implemented by PGA Tour, said Gredenhag.
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CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.
[...]
This was just an excursion to determine whether CentOS 6 could be a good candidate as a desktop distribution for non-experts, or new users. The verdict: Unless you do not mind getting digital grease on your hands, there are better RPM-based distributions available. Fedora or any Fedora Spin, makes a better desktop distribution than CentOS 6.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Klaus Knopper has released version 6.7 of his Debian-based live-CD Linux distro. Again employing the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), it is also said to include version 3.3.3 of the LibreOffice suite, the Chromium 12 web browser, and a new version of ADRIANE (Audio Desktoop Reference Implementation And Network Environment) for partially-sighted users.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Package management in Linux is great, but unfortunately, it comes with a few cons. Granted, most distributions keep all your software, not just system software like Apple and Microsoft, updated. The downside is that software packages aren’t always the latest versions. Whatever is in the repository is what you get. Another frustration is when the software you want to install isn’t in the distribution repositories at all.
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The unity shell and the top panel was always a design headache for those who behind the development. The design in its current form itself was criticized by many and was one of the reasons why many people hated unity. The daily builds of the unity 2D had a new iteration of the design apparently trying to solve some of the issues associated with the desktop shell. The new design now is now causing far more criticism than the current version.
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After all the controversy that followed the release of Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal,” it’s hard not to anticipate with at least some anxiety the upcoming debut of version 11.10, also known as “Oneiric Ocelot.”
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Mark Shuttleworth: The patent system is often misunderstood. It’s sold as a way of giving the little guy an opportunity to create something big … when in fact patents don’t really work that way at all.
What they do very well is keep the big guys entrenched and the little guys out. For example, it’s very common in established industries for all of the majors to buy up or file as many patents as they can covering a particular area. They know and accept that the other majors are all in the same industry and essentially cross-license each other to keep the peace within that defined market. But they use that arsenal to stop new entrants coming in and disrupting the market.
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Phones
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Android
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ComScore’s second-quarter U.S. smartphone study shows that Android went up two percent in June to 40.1 percent share, while Apple’s iOS remained steady at 26.6 percent. Meanwhile, Jumptap released a study comparing usage state-by-state, showing iOS’ strength in New England and the upper Midwest and Android’s greater popularity in the South and West.
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Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a Android reference platform for vertical-market smartphones and tablets. The EB Specialized Device Platform is available now with a Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor — an OMAP4 version is coming next year — and a 4.0- or 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, plus a wide variety of wireless and sensor options including 4G LTE.
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Google Wallet and other mobile payment providers, coupled with Near Field Communcation-enabled smartphones, are stimulating the production of contactless technology in cash registers, says ABI Research. Some 85 percent of Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals that ship in 2016 will be “contactless-enabled,” up from 10 percent in 2010, says the research firm.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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As we’ve reported, free training and documentation resources for open source projects have proliferated in recent years. Likewise, organizations like The Linux Foundation and commercial open source companies such as Red Hat offer substantial training resources, many of them free. Still, InfoWorld cites niche security applications in conjunction with a lack of in-house skills at many companies, and this is a good point.
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Last year I was acting as a judge for the e-commerce application category, while this time I’ll be part of the Open Source Business Applications jury.
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The great guys at Packt Publishing just released the details for theirs 2011 Open Source awards.
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Open source research often paints the community as a homogeneous landscape. I have collected stories from open source contributors to begin constructing a new narrative of diverse experience. These contributors are 20 women and men, living in seven countries.
Dedicated people have enacted some impressive initiatives, but a deep gender gap still exists. You may have heard recent conference sessions about increasing diversity in open source, seen the anti-harassment policies, or noticed the women’s groups in large open source projects.
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Welcome to another edition of Take Five. In today’s edition I talk open source software development in today’s enterprise world with Clay Loveless, currently founder at Jexy and formerly of Mashery (where he was a co-founder).
Stephen Wellman (SW): Hello, Clay, welcome to Take Five, a new feature on the SourceForge blog where we discuss the pressing issues facing today’s IT professionals. It’s a pleasure to have with us. As someone who works with developers, how has the role of open source software development changed in today’s business world? Are larger businesses more amendable to open source now than they were a few years ago?
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…like the Javascript Version (pyjs), the “Desktop Version” (pyjd) is actually available for multiple platforms as well: Windows (all versions dating back even to Windows 2000), Apple (tablets as well as laptops and desktops), Android (all versions), GNU/Linux (all versions), GNU/FreeBSD (all versions) – about the only modern platforms the Desktop version isn’t available for is for Blackberry OS and Symbian, because they’re proprietary.
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Events
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While the Berlin Desktop Summit is still happening this week, happening next week in Vancouver, Canada is the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon North America 2011 event. This event is special, in particular, for it being the 20th anniversary of Linux.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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For well over a year now, Google has been hyping up something called Native Client. It’s an open source technology that allows a web browser to run compiled native code. In other words, it’s a potential missing link between native apps and web apps. And now it’s finally getting baked into Chrome.
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I quite like Google’s Chrome operating system (OS)–a Linux variant that use the Chrome Web browser as its interface–but as it’s being shipping today, Chrome OS has problems. Fortunately, in the latest Chrome OS stable channel release, Google is finally addressing some of these rough spots.
To put it to the test, I installed the new Chrome OS, Chrome version 13.0.782.108, to my Samsung Chromebook. It took a while to install-not the installation itself, that took about a minute-but to get it going. I had to click the update button several times to get things going. I’m not the only one who found that to be the case.
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Funding
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Cloud-based PHP “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) vendor AppFog on Thursday announced an $8 million round of venture funding.
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We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.
What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, where open source is prevalent and disruptive, and also mobile computing, which continues to be impacted by openness.
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Project Releases
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This is to announce diffutils-3.1, a stable, bug-fix release. There have been more than 50 build, test and portability-related changes in diffutils proper, as well as over 2100 in gnulib. In spite of all that, there have been only a few bug fixes, and only one that was worthy of a NEWS entry (below).
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Public Services/Government
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Bristol City Council’s failure to deliver on its open source strategy is beginning to make the coalition government’s manifesto commitment on open source look incontinent.
The council’s own open source strategy is looking ineffectual. Bristol Council cabinet committed to an open source infrastructure a year ago – as long as it was doable. It ordered a pilot but that was discredited by an allegation that it had been fixed. Now the council has refused to release the suspect pilot reports under Freedom of Information, it is time to look at those allegations in full.
Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius, told MPs in May how, left to establishment suppliers Capgemini and Computacenter, the open source strategy got caught in a thicket of indifference and vested interests.
Bristol set an original deadline for its open source strategy to be costed and risked by November 2010. They told Capgemini to get on with it, said Taylor, but Capgemini did nothing. Bristol told Capg to work with Sirius, who were experienced implementing open source infrastructures for companies like SpecSavers. They ignored Surius, said Taylor in a letter to MPs on the Parliamentary Administration Select Committee (PASC).
The council meanwhile tendered for an open source infrastructure using the £6bn Buying Solutions Framework for Commodity IT Hardware and Software (CHITS). Thus it would be ready to roll when the pilot produced its recommendations.
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Licensing
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Unfortunately, the way to answer this question is to follow the money. Most companies have coders sign intellectual property-focused and Fair Use-focused agreements that make clear that code produced while working for (and being paid by) the company belongs to the company. If the coder was being paid a salary while contributing to an open source project, the company almost always has the right to claim ownership of the code.
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Standards/Consortia
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I attended the 6th ODF Plugfest took place in Berlin a few weeks ago, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). It followed the pattern of previous events, a two-day event, with the first day dedicated to technical interop activities among implementors, followed by a day of public presentations.
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The Gnumeric Team is pleased to announce the availability of Gnumeric version 1.10.17. This should be used together with the concurrently released goffice 0.8.17. This is most likely the last release in the stable 1.10.x series.
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Our friends at Skype have added support for one-to-one VP8 video calling in Skype 5.5 for Windows. If both users in a Skype video call are using Skype 5.5, the call will use VP8 to encode the video streams for optimum transmission across the Internet. Skype also uses VP8 for group video calling.
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Apple’s inflexibility and greed has forced Amazon to release an HTML 5 Kindle that you’ll love.
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“8″ has not even been released yet, but Phoney “7″ which has and is the model for “8″ has lost two thirds of its share of the smart phone market.
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Health/Nutrition
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Pharmaceutical companies are carrying out fake, pseudo-studies on humans as a marketing devices to get doctors familiar with new drugs. In such studies, called “seeding trials,” drug companies invite hundreds of doctors to take part in a research study by asking them to recruit patients to serve as subjects.
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They consider banning the sale of cigarettes a form of censorship, and they hide themselves behind the legality of the product.
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Security
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We just wrote about a GAO report showing how the Defense Department is somewhat incompetent at dealing with online threats. Of course, it’s not clear that anyone else in the government is any better. The GAO is back with yet another report, dinging the State Department for its dreadful computer security monitoring program. In this case, it’s talking about threats to the State Department’s network, rather than to third parties. And while the State Department spent a whopping $1.2 billion of taxpayer money on a fancy computer system, called iPost, to monitor everything, it turns out that it only works on Windows machines:
But the iPost service only covers computers that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system, not other assets such as the roughly 5,000 routers and switches along State’s network, non-Windows operating systems, firewalls, mainframes, databases and intrusion detection devices, GAO auditors said.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, carried out the “opportunistic” theft at a Lidl supermarket in Brixton as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house.
Robinson threw away the water and ran when he was confronted by police but was arrested and quickly admitted what he had done.
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Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” — formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.
In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.
How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.
Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.
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London Metropolitan police has allowed the public to use weapons against suspected rioters and looters if households or businesses “honestly” believe they pose a threat.
In a document sent to businesses in the British capital, the Scotland Yard authorized the use of what is known as “reasonable force” saying people can defend themselves in their homes or businesses by weapons if they believe they could be attacked.
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Perez and his partner Mike Gomez, a bodyguard resembling The Sopranos’ Silvio, finally track down their client at a Barnes & Noble. Two of the countersurveillance guys go back to scouting for menaces, while Perez and Gomez, both of whom are trained sharpshooters and martial-arts experts, step in as the Primary’s “close protection” team. Shoppers stare at the entourage, straining to recognize someone famous.
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A Toronto judge has ruled that “adrenalized” police officers acted as aggressors at a peaceful political rally that led to dozens of arrests during last year’s G20 summit.
“The only organized or collective physical aggression at that location that evening was perpetrated by police each time they advanced on demonstrators,” Justice Melvyn Green ruled on Thursday. He was referring to a demonstration at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. on Saturday, June 26, 2010.
Green stated police criminalized political demonstration, which is “vital” to maintain a “viable democracy.”
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David Cameron is on a collision course with the police after the government used an emergency Commons debate on the English riots to issue a point-by-point dissection of the police’s “insufficient” tactics during the week.
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The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan’s death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I’ve heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they’re the real victims) saying the behaviour is “unjustifiable” and “unacceptable”. Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet’s fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that’s been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies’ man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?
However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable” it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends….
After comparing IPCC models with actual data, [lead author Pierre] Rampal and his collaborators concluded that the forecasts were significantly off: Arctic sea ice is thinning, on average, four times faster than the models say, and it’s drifting twice as quickly.
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Finance
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The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A “radical, possibly deranged, truthteller” will be the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said political commentator Tucker Carlson at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in New Orleans. Speaking between workshops on the benefits of carbon emissions and task force meetings where corporations and politicians vote on “model bills,” Carlson joined right-wing leaders who sang the praises of the Tea Party and “sticking to your guns,” cursed Obama and other “big government liberals,” and praised the same “cut, cap, and balance” agenda manifest in the ALEC bills and pushed by national politicians in Washington D.C.
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The fight against global warming pollution requires the investment of everyone, including the world’s multinational corporate giants. Many companies have taken official stances on climate pollution, pledging to reduce their greenhouse footprint in order to reduce the threat of a destabilized climate.
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Seeking to boost Hispanic consumption, liquor giant Diageo is turning to TV, making a major upfront buy on Univision Communication’s Galavision cable network as well as on every owned and operated Univision station.
The year-long deal represents the first time a liquor company has bought upfront time — the period in which marketers buy up available commercial inventory from networks before the fall season — on every Univision station, Univision told Ad Age. The piecemeal purchase was necessary because Univision does not accept national liquor buys on the network.
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Bahrain is in the news again, this time for what appears to be the comically evil persecution of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.
So, naturally, the ruling monarchy of the Gulf nation has hired a top Washington public relations firm to burnish (or attempt to salvage) its image, according to a new foreign agent registration filing. Qorvis Communications will be paid $40,000 per month, plus expenses, for the public relations work, according to a contract submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.
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Censorship
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Take a moment and let that sink in. Randi Zuckerberg doesn’t just think that you should be using your real name on Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn — she thinks pseudonyms have no place on the Internet at all. And why should we take the radical step of stripping all Internet users of the right to speak anonymously? Because of the Greater Internet F***wad Theory, or the “civility argument,” which states: If you allow people to speak anonymously online, they will froth at the mouth, go rabid, bully and stalk one another. Therefore, requiring people to use their real names online should decrease stalking and bullying and generally raise the level of discourse.
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After several days of destructive riots throughout the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron is practically tripping over himself in his eagerness to sacrifice liberty for security.
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Here’s another one for our lists of government-less Internets: MondoNet. According to the MondoNet website: “The purpose of this project is to study the technological, social and regulatory feasibility of developing a peer-to-peer mesh networking protocol.”
MondoNet was founded by academics at Rutgers University, and the university is supporting the team’s research. The project is close to being able to test its mesh networking protocol in actual, real-life communities.
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Civil Rights
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Some people have called for temporary suspension of services; David Cameron appeared to suggest suspension of Facebook and Twitter in some circumstances (TBC). We do not believe this should be given any serious consideration. Clearly, a service will be used by people for legitimate activities, some of which will in fact be to mitigate or deal with the problem encountered. In any case, innocent people should not be punished for the actions of others.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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DRM
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If you are a Kindle user disappointed by the lack of a dedicated desktop application for Linux, there’s good news for you. Amazon.com has just launched their new HTML5-powered cloud-based web app called Amazon Cloud Reader. The webapp runs flawlessly on Linux with support for offline reading and much much more. Here’s what it has to offer.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The European Parliament Trade Committee operates as secretive as Navy Seals. In the last year, the Committee commissioned a study and requested a Legal Service opinion on ACTA. While these were official decisions the Committee made, there is no record on this at all. The Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) seems to make a distinction between public minutes and non public coordinators’ notes. The Register maintains everything is published. See our letter to the Parliament’s Register.
It may seem silly to compare the work of a parliamentary committee to Navy Seals operations. Of course, it is silly. The EU foreign intellectual property policy is much more deadly.
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The fantasy depends on unlimited energy and the Star Trek replicator which produces an unlimited supply of whatever goods are desired. The dream becomes a nightmare when intellectual property is introduced, followed by lawyers, and bureaucrats to enforce these rights.
The fantasy originated in Peter Frase’s blog, where he writes, “In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.”
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In a much anticipated decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has rejected the Southern District of New York’s court’s holding that could have rendered invalid all patents claiming isolated forms of naturally occurring DNA molecules. However, the decision is somewhat nuanced and will be appealed.
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In an unprecedented, though much delayed, decision, the National Biodiversity Authority of India (NBA) has decided to initiate legal action against M/s Mahyco/Monsanto and their collaborators for accessing and using local brinjal varieties in developing Bt Brinjal without prior approval of the competent authorities. The official resolution giving effect to this decision was taken in the NBA’s meeting of 20th June 2011, the minutes of which were released only on 11 August 2011.
http://www.nbaindia.org/meetings/meeting.htm
The decision of the NBA reads as follows:
“A background note besides legal opinion on Bt brinjal on the alleged violation by the M/s. Mahyco/M/s Monsanto, and their collaborators for accessing and using the local brinjal varieties for development of Bt brinjal with out prior approval of the competent authorities was discussed and it was decided that the NBA may proceed legally against M/s. Mahyco/ M/s Monsanto, and all others concerned to take the issue to its logical conclusion.” (Emphasis supplied)
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Copyrights
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Rhianna and Def Jam Music must stand trial for being inspired by David LaChappelle’s ideas regarding photographic images.
They didn’t copy a damned thing. They were only inspired by someone else’s work which influenced they way in which they created a new work – the same way all creation happens on some level.
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Canadian copyright law prevents me from posting examples of my ‘published’ work, that is to say, produced television episodes that I wrote, on my own web page on the Internet.
Because I don’t control the copyright.
The same holds true for all the other creative professionals whose creative input went into the work, because a corporate entity holds the rights to all of our combined creativity. As near as I can tell, the corporation owns these rights by virtue of picking up the tab.
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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday he would soon submit his proposals on intellectual property rights and copyright regulation on the Internet.
“I have commented on intellectual property right issues more than once recently,” he said at a media briefing at the RIA Novosti newsroom.
At the G8 summit in France last month and the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week, Medvedev said the advent of the Internet means that traditional approaches toward intellectual property rights need to be changed.
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ACTA
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The European Parliament Committee on International Trade requested the Parliament’s Legal Service an opinion on ACTA (pdf). Compared with the request US Senator Wyden made, and seen the European academics Opinion on ACTA, the questions are very narrow. The questions seem carefully designed to minimize damage to ACTA.
Senator Wyden has asked in an October 8, 2010 letter that the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress undertake and provide to Congress: “a written, independent determination of whether the commitments put forward in the agreement diverge from our domestic laws or would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. I ask the Division pay particular attention to the provisions relating to injunctions, damages, and intermediary liability.” It is an open question and includes whether ACTA would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. This is important for finding a solution for access to orphaned copyrighted works and patent reform.
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