02.19.13
Posted in GNU/Linux at 4:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ZaReason joins opposition to restricted boot, whereas others reluctantly adopt it
THE UEFI saga does not simply end… and that’s a good thing!
According to some extraction work by Pogson, there is OEM pushback against what Microsoft was scheming:
She starts by pointing out that “SecureBoot” is a brilliant scheme by M$ to extend its control of hardware-suppliers. Eventually, the supply of machines that shipped “7″ without UEFI/Secureboot enabled will dry up and */Linux will have to deal with it. End-users tend not to want to disable a “security” feature. That it’s mostly a “security” feature for M$, not users.
A few days ago I recommended ZaReason to a person who was looking for a GNU/Linux (preinstalled) box. They seem like a decent business which antagonises restricted boot as everyone should.
As one person told me today:
Accommodating Restricted Boot is a fruitless task that only serves Microsoft Microsoft pretends to leave an escape route open only to lure more people into their trap which they can spring at any time for any reason. We must reject UEFI and restricted boot.
New coverage from London says that Fedora takes a step to eliminate restricted boot:
When users disable the security checks in the Shim Secure Boot bootloader, the latest Fedora 18 kernels will disable any restrictions that are caused by their Secure Boot support. This means that Fedora now offers a very simple way of neutralising any Secure Boot restrictions that can be used uniformly on all systems and doesn’t require users to disable Secure Boot in the UEFI firmware setup.
Here is another update from London:
The Sabayon developers have released version 11 of the Gentoo-based Linux distribution. The 64-bit live images of Sabayon 11 can now boot and install on UEFI systems with Secure Boot enabled, as the Sabayon developers decided to adopt Matthew Garret’s signed-shim. A SecureBoot key is in the /SecureBoot directory of the live media and can be used on initial booting, while a SecureBoot keypair is generated during installation and can then be added to the firmware’s database, which allows users to sign their own binaries.
This is not a great solution because it leaves many distros out in the cold. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical, joined by fronts like the Linux Foundation, should have filed antitrust complaints. They didn’t. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Tax stories that elucidate absurdities and injustice
THE other day while researching NDAA I was reminded of Microsoft’s legalised tax fraud (legalised because Microsoft has former execs inside the government). A site called Washington Liberals bears the tagline:
Legislators can’t pay for education, give a billion dollars every year to Microsoft.
What’s curious about it is that Microsoft, while not paying tax, wishes to tax us, taxpayers. To do this it even relies on biased Seattle courts, as Pamela Jones continues to show:
The November trial in Microsoft v. Motorola has been reopened, so Motorola can introduce new evidence. Apparently, Motorola and Microsoft were on the phone with the judge presiding in the Seattle litigation, Judge James L. Robart, in connection with a new Motorola request to reopen the trial so it can submit additional evidence, and he has just granted [PDF] Motorola’s request, despite Microsoft’s opposition. This is unusual, to say the least.
Well, as noted the other day, other large companies wants an Android tax to feed them. Their greed is without boundaries. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Stuck in status quo
Summary: The USPTO shows no real signs of changing; news still focused on the wrong questions; US-style patent system expands to other countries
THE USPTO has had a rigged debate going on to save face and Obama showed disinterest in new types of attitudes, so ignore his empty promises which the media continues to cover. Here is what the US president says:
Obama says patent reform needs to go farther
President Barack Obama, in an unusual foray into patent law, on Thursday said U.S. patent reform needs to go farther to address the trend of companies that do not manufacture any products aggressively suing other companies for patent infringement.
Notice how the ‘pro-reform’ people are for “limiting” patents, not eliminating them. So “if we have software patents, they should be limited to the actual algorithm disclosed by patentee,” says this one person. It is similar to copyright then, patents are an overkill.
The debate has been rigged for a while now because lawyers easily outnumber developers in them.
Here is what one site said about the roundtable:
There are speakers on both sides of the software patent divide. Notable pro-reform speakers include Mark Lemley (Stanford), Colleen Chien (Santa Clara), Julie Samuels (EFF), Jon Potter (Application Developers Alliance) and Edward Goodmann (Hattery Labs).
Note that the lawyers at the USPTO call it “Software Partnership” and the introduction is rigged by design. It says:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is forming a partnership with the software community to enhance the quality of software-related patents (Software Partnership). The Software Partnership will be an opportunity to bring stakeholders together through a series of roundtable discussions to share ideas, feedback, experiences, and insights on software-related patents.
The USPTO matters to everyone due to globalisation and its practices are spreading to New Zealand more quickly than one may realise. Here is some news from this island:
A long-running court action touching on copyright law’s provisions on “reverse engineering” of computer software has resulted in a victory for Fisher & Paykel Finance, the company accused of copyright and trade-secrets breach. The software provider, Californian company Karum, has, however appealed Justice Rodney Hansen’s decision.
The EU too is affected (same trend as such) and Simon Phipps, the British president of the OSI, continues to worry about the unitary patent when he writes:
Our leaders would have us believe the Unitary Patent is good for small business. But there seems to be a fatal flaw.
Phipps does a good job busting the myths, saying that a “small British company could find itself subject to court cases it can’t understand in countries it can’t afford to defend itself. Any patent holder in any one of the 27 EU countries can go to a local court and get a judgment in any one of the 23 official languages. Once Cable signs this agreement, the UK government agrees a judgment like this is enforceable against any UK business.”
Trolls must love this. █
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Posted in Patents at 3:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The code of life becomes monopolies thanks to the function of the USPTO
THE USPTO must have lost its mind when it permitted gene patenting. Its mind was abducted by parasite corporations and a “contribution to our gene patenting symposium comes from Andrew Torrance, Professor of Law at University of Kansas School of Law,” says this lawyers’ blog.
“It’s weird that BSA steps in on the Monsanto v Bowman case,” writes our contributor iophk, noting that Monsanto is making headlines again due to patents. “Supreme Court Set To Hear Case On Whether Or Not Planting Legally Purchased Seeds Infringes On Monsanto Patent,” says an insightful pundit and to quote a bit: “Believe it or not, the Business Software Alliance (mostly a Microsoft front) has also sided with Monsanto”
We have a page about BSA articles. It’s worth noting that the BSA also does copyright propaganda with IDG.
Here is another report about it [via Groklaw] and it says: “Patent exhaustion delimits rights of patent holders by eliminating the right to control or prohibit use of the invention after an authorized sale. In this case, the Federal Circuit refused to find exhaustion where a farmer used seeds purchased in an authorized sale for their natural and foreseeable purpose-namely, for planting.”
The corporate press describes this as a “Farmer’s use of genetically modified soybeans” and this site says: “What started with an Indiana farmer’s purchase of soybean seeds from a local grain elevator has become the heart of a legal war with an agribusiness behemoth with a potentially large impact on agriculture and the biotechnology industry.
“At the heart of the case that will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday is this question: Can a biotech corporation restrict a farmer’s use of seeds sprung from its genetically modified plants?”
Finally, here is an analysis which says:
It is a blessing upon this nation that Woody Guthrie’s voice, the relentless voice of the poor and the powerless, is heard anew this winter in the form of a powerful book, a newly-discovered novel titled House of Earth. Edited and with an extensive introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp, Guthrie’s book, written in 1947, searingly portrays the joy and sorrow of a poor farming couple living through the Dust Bowl during the Depression. And when I read it last week it naturally made me think immediately of the United States Supreme Court.
On Tuesday morning, the justices will hear oral argument in a fascinating case that would very much have interested Guthrie were he alive today. The case is styled Bowman v. Monsanto and, technically, it’s a conflict over seed-planning and federal patent law. It’s a story about technology and innovation and investment, about legal standards and appellate precedent and statutory intent, about the nature of nature and how the law ought to answer the basic question of who owns the rights to the seeds of planted seeds.
Whatever the outcome, this case helps highlight problems with the patent system. █
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Posted in America, Patents at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The bureaucracy facilitated by corporations causes tremendous damage to the economy, still
The other day at The Register, Matt Asay, whose writing skills are rich, published an article about intellectual monopolies and it said something insightful while citing John Lennon:
While I’ve never thought John Lennon’s Imagine offered a particularly useful prescription for peace, I am starting to wonder if it might not suggest something better than free and open-source software.
When Lennon sings that if we can just “imagine no possessions” we’ll end up with “all the people sharing all the world,” he’s almost certainly wrong, humankind being humankind. Maybe he never read Animal Farm. But given the outsized success free and open-source software have had, perhaps it’s time to take them a step further.
What we found antithetical to sharing was the USPTO, which is the institutional source of so many problems. We will increasingly target this institution, which is run by large companies for these companies.The USPTO was run by an IBM veteran, to whom software patents are acceptable. And as covered here many times before, OIN, a creation of an IBM veteran, has no way to defend against trolls. It makes it anything but ideal, but patents are passed from the cartel of IBM to companies like Google and HTC which defend Android from litigation. Here is a new report about the OIN:
The expanding reach of the IBM-supported Open Invention Network reflects the pervasiveness of the Linux operating system.
Open Invention Network is not the solution. It does nothing to stop patent trolls.
A troll which we recently covered is getting some new coverage also amid racketeering charges:
Innovatio IP Ventures is one of the most controversial patent trolls to emerge in the past few years. Like the oft-condemned Lodsys, Innovatio is asking for relatively small payouts from a large number of targets. But Innovatio’s campaign is even broader than other hated trolls like Lodsys: the company claims nothing less than a patent claim on using Wi-Fi.
In 2011, Innovatio started suing chain hotels and even local coffee shops, saying they infringed 17 patents that cover the use of Wi-Fi. Innovatio sued hundreds of businesses and has reportedly sent out more than 8,000 letters demanding license fees, generally ranging from $2,300 to $5,000. Instead of going after companies that make routers like Cisco, Innovatio targeted small businesses that simply use Wi-Fi, an increasingly common pattern.
Microsoft Facebook is being sued by a troll again. The British press says: “The claim for unspecified royalties, issued in federal court in Virginia by a holding company called Rembrandt Social Media, alleges that Facebook used technology developed by Jos Van Der Meer over a decade ago.” The MSBBC covered it too
The EFF, which wants to end software patents, wrote about a troll which pretends to be a real company in this post:
Patent trolls — companies that assert patents as a business model instead of creating products — have been in the news lately. This is hardly surprising, given that troll lawsuits now make up the majority of new patent cases. And the litigation is only the tip of the iceberg: patent trolls send out hundreds of demand letters for each suit filed in court. At EFF, we have been following this issue closely and are working hard to bring reform to fix the patent mess.
The recent news is not all bad. Just last month, for instance, online retailer Newegg won a long and hard-fought battle against a particularly egregious troll. To its credit, Newegg has a policy of never settling with patent trolls. So, after Soverain Software LLC, a company that sells no products but claims to own online “shopping cart” technology filed suit, Newegg took the case all the way to trial in the Eastern District of Texas. It lost that trial — but it lost for a strange reason: the judge refused to let Newegg argue to the jury that the patent was obvious (if a party can prove that a patent was obvious at the time it was granted, a court should invalidate the patent).
All those trolls are a sure way to drive innovation out of the country. Let’s hope that US politicians will recognise this and take progressive action. █
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02.18.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So, for about half the capital cost and half the cost of operation giving the same performance, you should use GNU/Linux rather than that other OS. It makes sense. When you add to these obvious advantages, which alone are sufficient to make the choice, the advantages of freedom from M$’s EULA, and the freedom to run the code, examine, modify and distribute the code under a FLOSS licence, it’s a no-brainer. Use FLOSS. Use GNU/Linux. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Humans may be the most creative species on the planet, but we spend a lot of time doing tedious things.
Look at the internet: it’s a revolutionary and disruptive technology, with the potential to change education, governments and scientific research, yet most people use it to post comments on YouTube videos of mobile phones being unboxed.
Here in the free software world, we’re familiar with the collaboration opportunities that the internet brings, and many great applications have been developed by teams of programmers around the globe.
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The very cool tones of Blues News bring word that Natural Selection 2 developers Unknown Worlds have released their ‘Decoder’ IDE – their Integrated Development Environment, or Thing Wot They Used To Program The Game – for free, taking the exciting decision to make it open source as well. The team created Decoder in 2007 using the programming language Lua, and until now they’ve been licensing it out to other developers, using the money to fund the company. Now that NS2 is out, Unknown Worlds have decided to not only remove the licensing fee but to open its innards to the public, with the intention of making it “the best IDE out there!”
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There’s also music on this $1 tier: Be Mine Anniversary Special EP, Recalibrated Vol. 1 (unlocked bonus) and Square Tactics (unlocked bonus)
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…they need just under $20,000 more to hit their target with 12 days to go.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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With Steam officially being released for Linux I took some time out this evening to run a few benchmarks on my Ubuntu 12.04 based Bodhi system to see how a few of the different modern Linux desktops compare in terms of OpenGL performance with the source engine. Please do not take my numbers to be anything super scientific or precise. I simply recorded a short demo using Team Fortress 2, loaded TF2 from Steam under each of the Linux desktops with no other background applications running and ran the demo through a built in source engine bench marking tool.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Several cool Linux items have popped up this week that deserved a mention. Someone over at Mageia is quite excited about the formation of a new documentation team. Just in case one person out there missed it, the Ubuntu family of distros released developemental versions of their upcoming 13.04s and the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS got an update. And for some strange reason, Chris Smart changed the name of Kororaa Linux to Korora Project.
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When your computer starts behaving strangely, won’t boot, or you start getting strange errors that you can’t pin down, a great way to troubleshoot the problem is to boot to a rescue disc and see if you can isolate the problem. It might be your operating system, it could be hardware, but you’ll never know until you boot to some other media to take a look. That said, there are tons of great system rescue discs to check out if you want a tool to save your ailing system. This week we’re looking at five of the best, nominated by you, our readers.
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New Releases
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“Community Editions” of Manjaro Linux are released as bonus flavours in addition to those officially supported and maintained by the Manjaro Team, provided that the time and resources necessary are available to do so.
Due to popular demand from members of the Manjaro community, this now includes a special new release of the MATE flavour for both 32 and 64-bit systems.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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For those people who use Mageia 2 and like to test other OSs or need to keep another OS for work purposes, installing Virtualbox from the Mageia repositories might lead them to a disappointment. The distro seems to only support Virtualbox OSE (as it is the only package in the repos), which does not allow one to enable USB support. Therefore, you end up with a Virtual Machine that cannot read your flash drive.
To solve this pesky problem, you must understand that the situation springs from having installed a Virtualbox version that does not do what you need or want. You must, then uninstall it and grab the Virtualbox PUEL version package from the Oracle site here.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has hired another well known name from the open-source Linux graphics driver community.
Rob Clark, the graphics driver developer from Texas Instruments that was part of the OMAP team and also collaborated with Linaro, has joined Red Hat. Rob Clark was the one largely responsible for the TI OMAP DRM/KMS driver, he’s also proposed DRI2 Video, worked on Wayland video playback, and most recently began the Freedreno driver.
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Fedora
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One rough spot was the boost rebuild. Boost has a cycle similar to Fedora, so a new major version comes along about every 6 months or so and requires rebuilding all the packages that use it. In Fedora thats around 170ish packages or so. I communicated with the Boost maintainers and we decided the best way forward was to just commit the new Boost and rebuild everything in one day and then fix up the parts that broke.
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Fedora 16 reached its official end of life at the beginning of the week. This means that the release was maintained for 16 months as opposed to the usual 13 months. In most cases, Fedora discontinues support for a release when the next version over has been released for a month. The three-month delay in the release of Fedora 18 explains the longer support cycle in this case.
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Last month saw the review of the Define R4, a big ATX tower that could easily double up as a small server case, with a lot of bells and whistles. This month we’re looking at the Node 304, also from Fractal Design, a small, Mini ITX case with a very minimal aesthetic. Don’t let appearances deceive you though, the Node can do a lot more than you’d think at a cursory glance.
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Phones
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Ballnux
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Android
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Motorola is set to launch a brand new smartphone in Australia which one senior Telstra executive has described as a “game changer”.
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CEO Meg Whitman may be directing HP to get back in the tablet game, and the first example could be an Android device. The move to go with Google’s OS is getting tongues wagging in Silicon Valley, but HP apparently wants in on an OEM trend to offer different operating systems as companies look to stay competitive in a changing computing environment.
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Two researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany have demonstrated a way of accessing an encrypted Android smartphone using a freezer. To access the cryptographic key stored in the phone’s memory, they placed the phone in the freezer compartment for an hour, with the result that the memory content remained – almost literally – frozen. They used a special tool to read the cryptographic key from the phone’s memory (cold boot attack).
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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ARCHOS, an award-winning innovator in consumer electronics, introduces the Platinum range, a new line of tablets that feature a sleek aluminum design combined with the best high-definition IPS displays, quad-core processors and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. There will be three tablets in the range including an 8-inch, 9.7-inch and 11.6-inch, all of which deliver true vivid colors, sharper text and amazingly fast performance.
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So instead of just running a pure Android tablet, you get the option to run your favorite Linux distribution and Android in dual-boot fashion, provided your Linux distribution has an edition for the hardware.
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PeerJS is a new open source JavaScript library and associated server which is designed to allow web applications running on different systems to contact each other. The developers say that PeerJS completes WebRTC, as the video connection protocol says nothing about how WebRTC-based clients should locate users to connect with.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We are proud to announce that Firefox Flicks will welcome back: Edward Norton (Oscar Nominated Actor), Shauna Robertson (Producer of hit comedies, including Superbad & Knocked Up) and Couper Samuelson (We Own the Night and Sundance Winning short, Whiplash ), to the judging panel, along with new judges Bob Harvey (EVP Global Sales and Marketing for Panavision), Franklin Leonard (founder of the Black List) and Catherine Ogilvie (EMEA Marketing for Dolby).
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The growth of FLOSS seems to be growing exponentially with few corners of the world remaining ignorant of FLOSS and therefor having choice in IT. What a refreshing time in which we live.
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Business
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Justice Department officials will give a congressional briefing Friday afternoon on DOJ’s handling of the case against Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was facing years in prison when he took his own life, a congressional aide tells The Huffington Post.
The aide said that Steven Reich, an associate deputy attorney general at DOJ, is expected to brief House Oversight Committee staffers, and potentially members, on Friday afternoon. A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
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Programming
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R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and visualization. The R language is frequently used by statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. The language is mature, simple, and effective. R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. It offers a large collection of intermediate tools for data analysis. R supports procedural programming with functions and, for some functions, object-oriented programming with generic functions. It includes conditionals, loops, user-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.
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Version 5.0 of the Texinfo GNU documentation format is now available and is designed to be more extendable thanks to the new Perl-based converter. According to the developers’ announcement, texi2any can convert Texinfo files to any format that is supported by texi2dvi and makeinfo. To use it, Perl 5.7.3 and its standard Encode module are required.
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Science
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A British academic has unearthed a 500-year-old proclamation calling for the arrest of the Renaissance political writer Niccolo Machiavelli.
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Health/Nutrition
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The crops under the association’s authority undergo their testing through an Israeli firm called Lab Path, which imports the same equipment used by the FBI and the CIA. Unlike the American intelligence organizations, the Ein Yahav association does not actually use the technology to check for chemical terror in the crops, but the incredibly expensive, sophisticated equipment allows Israeli agriculturists to ensure that the vegetables they sell are entirely residue free and safe to eat, Sade explained.
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Security
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A McAfee administrator accidentally revoked the digital key used to certify desktop applications that run on Apple’s OS X platform, creating headaches for customers who want to install or upgrade Mac antivirus products.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Key questions about the credibility of the Afghan attorney general’s office as it prepares to investigate accusations that Kam Air is involved in drug-smuggling.
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Mossad man was not a senior agent and did not do anything ‘iniquitous,’ writes leading Israeli security analyst, blaming Australian intelligence for putting media on his trail
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Zygier was not a senior Mossad agent, Ben-Yishasi stressed, but rather filled a role as more of a “support operative.”
Ben-Yishai speculated that an officer or officers in the ASIO, which called in Zygier and two other suspected Australian-Israeli Mossad agents for questioning months before his arrest — reportedly suspecting espionage activities and abuse of Australian passports — may have leaked the names of the trio out of frustration that the suspects hadn’t cracked, or injured professional pride, or anti-Israeli sentiment. Later, another factor may have been anger at Israel’s reported use of Australian passports in the alleged Mossad assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the Hamas weapons dealer, in January 2010 in Dubai. (A Kuwaiti claim that Zygier was himself involved in the alleged Mossad hit in Dubai has been widely discredited.)
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Palestinian prisoner Samer Issawi, 33, embarked on a hunger strike over 203 days ago to protest Israel’s inhumane treatment of detainees, making it one of the longest hunger strikes in human history.
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A Florida prisoner who escaped in Texas after stabbing a detective with his eyeglasses was shot and killed by law enforcement officers early Saturday after police officers responded to a report of a home burglary near Dallas, the authorities said.
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Believe it or not, there’s a fascinating debate going on over at NRO. First, Charles Krauthammer points to the muddle of the Administration’s white paper, which could have (he argues) just authorized Awlaki’s killing under the laws of war.
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What are the implications of US news outlets concealing the truth about drones in the interest of national security?
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It pays to ask a simple question when confronted with a piece of legislation such as the justice and security bill, which has become so complicated that probably no more than 100 people in the country fully understand it.
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Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan find little ethical defence in the ‘just war’. Each of us struggles to make peace with our actions
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President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the CIA met for an hour with one of the filmmakers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” the movie about the agency’s effort to find and kill Osama bin Laden.
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In our system, courts don’t grant indulgences or offer absolution; they decide cases, and they don’t advise the president.
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…special ops are blindly pushing the process of destabilisation forward.
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As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
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But who is to say we should align ourselves with U.S. foreign policy? Though its goals are at times morally defensible, they can also be appalling. The techniques soldiers learn at Yale might be used, for example, to identify candidates for President Obama’s “kill list,” which is itself unethical and likely illegal. If someone lies to protect their friend from ending up on that kill list, is that a lie it is moral to detect? By training soldiers to perform these interrogations, Yale would be complicit in achieving these goals.
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But I’m not aware of anyone commenting at length on the section she titles, “Constitutional and Statutory Concerns about Targeted Killings,” a 5-page discussion of assessing targeted killing in terms of due process, treason, and other laws.
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Different US Senate committees are supposed to do oversight of different federal agencies. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to oversee the Department of Justice. The Senate Armed Services committee is supposed to do oversight of the Pentagon. And the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to do oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency. Since the CIA is conducting drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and since this is, to say the least, a controversial policy, the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be doing oversight of that.
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Cablegate
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Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has been re-elected for a third term with more than 50% of the vote. His main challenger has admitted defeat.
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ECUADORAN President Rafael Correa has called on Europe to quickly settle the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who has been holed up in the country’s embassy in Britain for eight months.
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That should be enough to slingshot him from Knightsbridge to Canberra. Set aside the cheap diatribes and what you think of Julian Assange as a person, or whether he’s done this or not achieved that. The fact is that electoral victory for him later this year would be one of those rare political miracles that make life as a citizen worth living. In a country weighed down by sub-standard politicians, sub-standard journalists and sub-standard freedom of information laws, the political triumph would be great. It would breathe badly-needed life into Australian democracy. And, yes, if the miracle happened, from that very moment the fun party down under would begin.
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WikiLeaks didn’t unleash the end to government secrecy some feared (or hoped for). But Julian Assange, holed up in a London embassy, is planning his next act: running for the Australian Senate.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120 million to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.
The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of think tanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarizing “wedge issue” for hardcore conservatives.
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Thousands of environmental activists from across the continent plan to gather in Washington, D.C., tomorrow to launch a two-week protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to U.S. oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. The massive pipeline would cross the Yellowstone River, as well as the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest freshwater aquifer in the United States.
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Finance
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A senator critical of Wall Street took regulators to task on Thursday for failing to take banks to court over misconduct, coming out swinging in her first public appearance as a member of the Senate Banking Committee.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The next scenes feature backstage shots of the Saudi Arabia “set” – an entire news crew, complete with fake props.
Turns out Jaco, Rochelle and their crew aren’t in Saudi Arabia at all. They are on a sound set near the CNN headquarters in Atlanta, a faked broadcast that the cable news channel eventually had to quietly admit.
The video contains clips of Jaco and crew clowning around. Jaco holds up a mock SCUD missile with a rag attached to its tail that acts as a rocket “plume.” The CNN reporter goes on to joke about how “they always call an ‘all clear’” when he orders his “burger and fries.” He clowns around about other things as well.
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Privacy
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Ambassador Philip Verveer addresses internet governance and casts water on European cloud privacy concerns.
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Civil Rights
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In the face of efforts to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), some buinesses have told lawmakers that the CFAA should be used to punish breach of contract where the breacher acted “for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. Such a proposal does not fix the ability of prosecutors to go after people for disregarding terms of service.
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The 2012 NDAA authorizes the U.S. military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens on U.S. soil, without a warrant or due process if the military simply suspects them of supporting terrorism. This is exactly what the U.S government did in 1942 to 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, and who spent years in prisons without notice of charges, the right to an attorney, or the right to a trial.
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Compare what Hirabayashi was fighting in 1942 with what is now legally codified under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which President Obama threatened to veto until it included language allowing U.S. citizens to potentially be indefinitely detaine
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The Washington State House is considering bill HB1581, which would create “the Washington state preservation of liberty act condemning the unlawful detention of United States citizens and lawful resident aliens under the National Defense Authorization Act.” There are 21 co-sponsors, with representatives from both major parties: Representatives Overstreet (R), Santos (D), Shea (R), Taylor (R), Buys (R), Condotta (R), Scott (R), Upthegrove (D), Fitzgibbon (D), Blake (D), MacEwen (R), Crouse (R), Wylie (D), Pollet (D), Pike (R), Harris (R), Kagi (D), Moscoso (D), Warnick (R), Magendanz (R), and Stonier (D).
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Indiana, South Carolina both bucking idea of arresting, holding Americans
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Chris Hedges, a former correspondent for the New York Times and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is lead plaintiff in a suit brought by a group of reporters and activists against the Obama Administration over the NDAA provision authorizing indefinite detentions without trial. He was one of a group of reporters awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the New York Times’ coverage of global terrorism.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The Python Software Foundation is in the midst of a trademark battle. A UK company is trying to trademark the name Python for software, services and servers everywhere in Europe. If successful, that would make it impossible for Python to continue to use the name in Europe, despite using it now for some 20 years. They have issued a call for help, which I’ll reproduce here to make sure everyone knows exactly how you can help.
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Copyrights
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Posted in IRC Logs at 7:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: February 10th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 11th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 12th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 13th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 14th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 15th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: February 16th, 2013
Enter the IRC channels now
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Posted in Dell, Microsoft at 7:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft Dell will die just like Nokia under Microsoft leadership, so here’s hoping that shareholders will stop the hijacking by Microsoft
“Shareholders are being pushed aside,” says the article “The Dell Deal May Die”. We covered this before; although revocation is improbable, it is still possible. Microsoft is struggling with hardware, so it tries to occupy companies which make or distribute hardware.
Daniel Eran Dilger, who had ridiculed the now-dead Zune for a long time, wrote that “Microsoft sells out of Surface Pro, just like the Zune HD did in 2009″ and even IDG pokes fun:
Of course, Microsoft could settle the sell-out controversy by releasing sales numbers for Surface Pro.
Secrecy means they have a lot to hide. It would expose lies or deception, thereby becoming a PR disaster. Those fake shortages which we covered after Microsoft had captured Dell are not taken without a barrel of salt and Microsoft still cannot sell such tablets due to lack of apps — something which Microsoft tries to compensate for by ripping Android off. IDG had this to say:
When it comes to mobile platforms, it’s all about the apps. Got apps? Then you’ve got users. If you don’t, then you don’t–just ask BlackBerry about its failed Playbook, and both Palm and HP about the disaster that was WebOS. Overall app quality means more than numbers alone, of course, but if you don’t have many apps populating a storefront, the odds are pretty low that new entries will knock your socks off.
Dell will suffer with Microsoft if it does not stay independent or shareholders-run. Nokia phones lack apps due to Microsoft and some believe that Dell will be “Nokia 2.0″. Here are some quotes:
“When I first heard that Dell was going to go private, I had hopes that this might be an effort to get away from Microsoft’s control, but those hopes were dashed pretty quickly when I saw that Microsoft itself was investing 2 billion in the venture,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “Now it looks like Microsoft is being even less subtle about its OEM manipulation.”
Watch where Nokia has come under Microsoft leadership:
Nokia would license its flagship phone software from Microsoft, rather than develop its own, set fire to three of its own mobile platforms, and eventually shed thousands of jobs. Nokia now has a smaller head count than at any time since 1998.
Since it’s also a year since Nokia ripped up the Symbian roadmap – as we exclusively revealed at the time – it’s a good time to ask: how’s the partnership with Microsoft going?
Nowhere. It’s another company killed by Microsoft, with many people losing their jobs.
Windows is a dead end in a world which goes mobile (I write my articles on a tablet out in nature right now), so Microsoft relies on the other cash cow, which depends on Windows monoculture. Here is a sure way to kill this cow’s momentum as well:
Microsoft, long-standing hater of piracy, appears to have decided to step up their targeting system to place their own customers directly in their crosshairs. Your immediate reaction may be to blast the previous sentence as hyperbole, but you would be wrong to do so. Nothing else can explain what they are doing with their Microsoft Office 2013 retail software, which is to make it a single install license that is forever tied to one machine.
No network effect then. Say goodbye to Microsoft with such moves, but will Dell die with Microsoft just as Nokia is? It’s up for Michael Dell to decide. Tomi T Ahonen shows Dell at #5 among computer makers (Nokia is at #8).
Its time to update the biggest computer-maker listing. I really wish the big analyst houses would take over this chore, they report on the data separately already.. but yes, I was the first to start to count smartphones into the total computer shipment numbers and have reported that statistic now for many years already. If you want to see the chart for end of 2011, its here.. Time to do the 2012 number update…
Nokia fell very sharply. Can’t Dell learn from it?
Microsoft is trying to force people to get Office just like Windows because, as iophk puts it, they are “going after data lock-in in Indonesia” (not just in Indonesia):
Microsoft Indonesia, the local arm of software giant, Microsoft Corporation, is in talks with computer manufacturers to embed Office 365, the US company’s cloud-based software service, in personal computers (PCs), executives said.
Andreas Diantoro, president director of Microsoft Indonesia, said that the company was discussing with vendors of at least seven leading PC brands the possibility of collaborating on Office 365.
The brands, he said, included Acer, Hewlett Packard and Toshiba.
“We are exploring the possibility of bundling our product with that of our partners’,” he pointed out.
“Piracy helps Microsoft,” iophk notes, quoting: “Microsoft, he said, had a 98 percent share of the software market but only 10 percent of that market used legally-purchased software.”
“Unless it is that FOSS has a larger market share there than elsewhere,” he added. █
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