Showing headlines posted by brideoflinux

Sometimes, however, mobs form. Posses meet up outside a hated website and hit the owners with barrages of venomous email. If a site has a forum or a Facebook page, they try to take over. If it’s supported by ad money, they might launch a campaign against the advertisers, as happened in 2010 with Cooks Source Magazine–a New England site brought down by web users for cavalierly stealing content.

If all of this fails to satisfy the mob’s thirst for blood, they might take their anger directly to the website’s landlord, the hosting company, with burlap bags filled with DMCA take-down notices the host can’t afford to ignore.

If memory serves, the only evidence we ever saw were some clumsily disguised lines of code from Linux that matched Unix code line for line. There was a good reason for the match; it was BSD code dating back to the infamous settlement between AT&T and Berkeley.

We’ve actually seen this theory in practice on numerous occasions, and it nearly always worked out just as Torvalds predicted. As an example, take the case of LibreOffice, which started as a fork of OpenOffice.org. Most users agree that The Document Foundation has greatly improved on the original OOo code, so much so that many if not most OpenOffice users have made the switch to LibreOffice.

The boot took forever. Several times I thought the system had stalled, then the progress bar would creep ever so slightly forward. After more than a few minutes I was prompted for the keyboard language, so I used the USB mouse I attach to the laptop whenever I’m at home and selected “English.” After another two or three minutes the desktop started showing up, piece by piece, but still very slowly. I killed time by playing with the mouse a bit, watching the cursor play across the screen. Unfortunately, when the installation was complete, the mouse and keyboard suddenly quit working. With no way to address the system, I took it down cold with the power button and rebooted. Again, it took forever to load and I lost use of the mouse, trackpad and keyboard the instant the boot was complete. This was only a minor inconvenience. I’d soon get help on the PCLOS forums and would have this problem fixed in short measure.

UNetbootin is a simple no frills tool, the type of program that used to populate the shelves at Egghead and other software stores back before the Internet changed everything. Using it to make a bootable USB drive from an ISO image is so easy even your grandmother could do it. Not only that, the application comes equipped to download and copy quite a few tools that might come in handy on a rescue drive.

The first choice you make after opening UNetbootin is between “Distribution” and “Diskimage.” If you choose the first option, you then choose a distro and version from two drop down list boxes. If the distro you need is on the list, this saves you the chore of downloading the image yourself, it’s all done for you. In addition, this list includes the tools you need for a good rescue operation, such as Parted Magick, Dr. Web Antivirus and NTPasswd.

Trying to understand the recent patent licensing deal between Microsoft and Amdocs is like watching a poker tournament, where you never know if a player is bluffing or if they have a pat hand. In this case, it appears that Microsoft is bluffing when it comes to Linux. An inspection of the facts, as they are known, indicate that the “Linux licensing” element of the story is only more Microsoft FUD–with Amdocs being a willing participant.

The other day, when my friend’s laptop spit-up a warning from ZoneAlarm that she was no longer protected, I stood over her shoulder and instructed her to update the firewall. The warning was basically a scare tactic, of course. Without the update she would still be protected, just as protected as she had been the day before. She just wouldn’t have any new whiz-bang features included in the update, nor would she be able to take advantage of any new security enhancements.

We ran the default install. This was Windows, so there had to be a reboot. After that, we opened the browser to find that the homepage had been reset to a ZoneAlarm themed Google search page. We had not opted-in to any such change; the ZoneAlarm folks had just taken it on themselves to hijack Firefox’s revenue, which I didn’t think cricket.

This doesn’t bode well for Nokia, which has gambled it’s future on Windows, or Microsoft. Both companies would like us to believe the move was brought about by Redmond’s recent announcement there will be no upgrade path from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 when it’s released in a few months time. The truth seems to be that consumers simply aren’t interested in portable Windows devices, despite the gee-whiz advertising that’s been showing up on network TV recently.

There was a big difference between the pre-release days then and the current situation as we wait for Windows 8?s big official debut. Back then, all the Windows fans were actually looking forward to Vista. XP had been a big hit, and the Redmond fan boys thought Vista would be even a couple of notches better. After all, they’d been working on it for ages; all that work was bound to turn into the most super duper operating system ever.

The FOSS community is understandably upset with both Red Hat and Ubuntu for their planned ways of implementing UEFI Secure Boot. Indeed, both companies plans are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Free software isn’t free if it requires permission from an outside source before it can be loaded onto a new or used computer. This is true even if the permission comes from a well-meaning bureaucratic regulatory agency. It’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.

Federal authorities were evidently waiting for SOPA to pass before making their move against him and his site. On the same night that public opinion forced SOPA to fail, however, the feds decided to act anyway. They took down his website and had Dotcom taken into custody by the New Zealand authorities. They seized most of his assets, without proving anything in court, and are now attempting to have him extradited to the United States.

The trouble is, too many big publicly held companies have invested tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder money buying up patents. Eliminating software patents, then, would wipe out billions of dollars in wealth being held not only by the trolls but by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Google, Apple and Microsoft. In other words, it isn’t going to happen. Too many of these guys employ people on K Street.

Software patents are costing us even more than we realize, however. We got an inkling this week from the BBC of how much that cost might be. It seems that the trolls alone are costing the U.S. $29 billion dollars yearly, according to James Bessen and Michael Meurer who took part in a study conducted by Boston University:

Every tech writer on the Internet seems to want to be the one to crack the code and figure out what Microsoft plans to do with Surface. I thought I was one of them until I spent three days trying to write this article. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t really care what Microsoft’s plans are or if they’ll pan-out for them. They bore me. They’re irrelevant now.

The first and last time I visited Diaspora was back in 2010, when the social destination was still in it’s Alpha release. Although it had a reputation, as alpha releases do, of being buggy, I was surprised at how well it worked. It was impressive, a lot like Facebook but also quite different in its design. The problem was, there was nobody there. It was like entering an eighteen story highrise apartment building in which all the tenents had been evicted, hollow and filled with virtual echoes. So I ran back to the noise of the crowd on the virtual party that is Facebook.

The most immediately important story has to do with a ruling made by a Washington, DC federal appeals court that will definitely slow down the trolls and might put them out of business altogether. Basically the ruling requires patent holders to sue each alleged offender separately and not bunch them together in a single lawsuit. Daniel Fisher at Forbes explains it this way:

Though it’s not likely to happen, there is a possible way, however, to make Linux the next “big thing” in consumer computing. It would require a lot of money, thought and work – and the stars would have to be aligned just right – but if executed properly might just give Tux some lasting traction on the desktop. What if a commercial Linux distro with deep pockets, say Ubuntu, decided to become an OEM and follow the Apple model? What if Shuttleworth decided the best way to sell Ubuntu was on his own machines? After all, right now he can’t really sell the desktop version of his operating system at all, he has to give it away. But if he packages the OS with an impressive Ubuntu branded computer, there might be some money to be made.

Nobody seems to want to talk about the desktop anymore. It seems that the trend followers have jumped to the next biggest thing. The glamor now isn’t in desktops and laptops, machines that do all the necessary grunt work, but in gee-whiz tablets and smart phones. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but desktops and laptops aren’t going to go away soon – not as long as there’s work to be done.

I just received an email from Demand Progress, a progressive web site, proclaiming, “Wow. We just won.” The reference, of course, was to Wednesday’s Internet blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA. Indeed, it does appear we’ve won a battle, as both bills appear to be dead – for the time being. Winning a battle is not the same thing as winning a war. The losing side in any war always wins at least a battle or two. A war isn’t won until the other side raises a white flag and agrees to terms of surrender. So far, all we’ve won is one battle.

It would be too easy, at this point, to deride Microsoft for their efforts. Certainly, there will be some who will scoff and point to the fact that Redmond is only acting to serve their own interests. However, there’s nothing wrong with serving one’s own interest. The way I figure it, we can’t call Microsoft to task when they do things such as stealing copyrighted code and invoking the DMCA over reverse engineering Skype, then not give them a pat on the head and a “good boy” when they make a valuable contribution to a free software project. Deriding Redmond here would only give them the opportunity to spew more FUD along the lines of “you can’t win with those fanatics.” It would also do nothing to encourage them to move in a direction that would be beneficial to all of us. When a dog is good, you throw him a bone, even if he’s usually a mean and vicious junkyard dog.

Of course, if I’m going to get busy and miss deadline, it’ll happen on a busy week in FOSS news. The fates work that way, I’m convinced. Indeed, after a couple of ho-hum weeks, the news flew fast and furious this week. Hold on, it’ll be a hell of a ride!

More Apps Downloaded to Android than to iPhone

It was reported on Tuesday that ABI Research says Android now leads the pack in the number of apps downloaded. According to their figures, 44% of all mobile apps downloaded are headed for Android devices, with 31% going to the iOS platform. These figures are miles away from what the research firm predicted back in 2009 as the mobile wars were just getting heated up: