Microsoft’s comments on happenings outside its immediate product portfolio are rare, and all the more valuable when they do appear. Here’s one from Horacio Gutierrez, “Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel”, entitled “Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones.”
By now, all the alarm bells should be going off: this is from Microsoft’s top intellectual monopoly bloke, writing about one of the most surprising and potentially disruptive lawsuits in the world of technology – and one that doesn’t even involve Microsoft directly. Why on earth is he doing it? Answer: because Microsoft has something very important to communicate.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski and FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn made a direct appeal to the civil rights community to support Net Neutrality rules during an appearance at a forum hosted by the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies in Washington earlier this month.
They argued that Network Neutrality offers the unique opportunity for people of color to compete in business and create their own media presence. But many of the largest civil rights groups in the country, like the League of United Latin American Citizens, NAACP, National Council of La Raza, Urban League and the Asian American Justice Center have either opposed or expressed skepticism about the “unintended consequences” of passing Network Neutrality rules. They claim that Network Neutrality would widen the digital divide.
It’s become something of a predictable phenomenon: an article, op-ed, or blog post will surface with an incendiary quote indicating that privacy is dead, or that Internet users have given up privacy with abandon. A slew of data is thrown around – often reporting on teenagers’ online habits – and a eulogy for privacy is trumpeted. Last week, the process repeated itself when a CNET article waxed and waned about why no one cares about privacy anymore.
It is true that our society’s use of technology is changing the ways we interact and has eroded some privacy barriers. However, claims that ‘no one’ cares about privacy are at best short-sighted hyperbole and at worst poorly veiled justifications for future infringements on privacy. As danah boyd [sic], a leading researcher on privacy, social networks, and youth aptly put it this weekend at SXSW: “When people say that privacy is dead, it just warrants others to disregard it.”
The Internet is expected to be inundated in the future with billions of gigabytes (or exabytes) of data as high-definition video and other bandwidth-busting downloads become the norm. The cost of upgrading the Internet for this so-called “exaflood” could make Web connections too expensive for most consumers. Internet service providers may be able to keep prices down by opening up an express-lane for large data hauls.
The Internet is on the verge of overheating, as big network routers are forced to sort through more and more data packets. One solution is to install photonic routers that leave data in the form of light, thereby avoiding unnecessary electronic processing. Researchers at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and LGS Innovations, both in New Jersey, have built an operational photonic router prototype that could conceivably manage hundreds of terabits of data per second.
Fluendo has announced the release of its Media Center, a software application developed by the Spanish company. Fluendo Media Center’s versatility was evident from the off when it was used for reproducing a whole manner of multimedia in a variety of devices using completely different platforms. Whether on Windows, Linux or Open Solaris; on netbooks, mobile internet devices (MIDs), notebooks or set-top boxes, Fluendo Media Center demonstrated not only its outstanding adaptability, but also its multiple features, attractive graphics and user-friendly interface. This first release will only be operational on Linux distributions but it is expected to get the application running on Windows in the near future.
Although OpenOffice.org is a competent productivity suite, you can add some nifty features to it using extensions. There are hundreds of nifty extensions available in the official extension repository. Some of them add a feature or two, while others take OpenOffice.org to a whole new level. The AuthorSupportTool (AST) extension belongs to the latter category. AST not just adds some random features to OpenOffice.org Writer, it dramatically enhances the word processor’s functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.
Epidemic is a desktop-oriented, KDE, Debian-based (GNU/Linux) distribution developed in Brazil. Epidemic 3.1, the latest edition, features a number of custom tools and improvements. One of those tools is EInstaller, the graphical installation program. It is supposed to be easy to use, but if you have are not familiar with disk partitioning under Linux, you’ll find that it’s not so easy to use. This tutorial provides an installation guide for Epidemic 3.1, with emphasis on the disk partitioning aspect.
EInstaller makes a very good attempt at simplifying the installation of Epidemic 3.1, but the disk partitioning section, especially if there are no existing Linux partitions, requires a little bit of guidance. The image below shows the installer’s main page on a system with an uninitialized disk. Because EInstaller lacks an automatic disk partitioning feature, you’ll have to manually partition the disk yourself. To do that, click on the ‘Partitioner’ button.
These days, I get involved in a lot of discussions about open source economics. Usually, they lead to an invitation to present our research and clarify “how open source works” to the audience. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish these three rather different areas of open source economics: (1) direct profits, (2) public welfare, (3) labor market. In more detail:
- Direct profits: Single-vendor commercial open source. Single-vendor open source projects are open source projects dominated or owned by a single firm. This firm wants to earn direct revenue streams from the project and become or remain profitable based on these revenues. Thus, this area of open source economics is about growing new software firms. Examples are MySQL, SugarCRM, and Jaspersoft. I’ve explained how some of this works in the article “The Commercial Open Source Business Model.”
- Public welfare: Community open source. Community open source projects are open source projects that are run by a diverse community of stakeholders; unlike single-vendor commercial open source, there is no single dominant owner. Community open source creates public welfare in the form of high-quality software that people can use for free and that innovators can build on. A maturing community open source project typically joins or creates an open source foundation to become sustainable. Examples are Linux, Apache, and Gnome. I’ve explained some of the economics behind this in the paper “The Economic Case for Open Source Foundations.”
Continue reading.
Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.
When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers’ activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made and emails sent and received.
As cloud computing moves data and services from local systems to remote centres, the question of security for organisations must be addressed. A research paper published in the International Journal of Services and Standards suggests that a cloud-free security model is the best way forward and will circumvent the fact that cloud service providers are not yet meeting regulations and legal standards.
In the early days of computing, users accessed resources using desktop terminals connected to a mainframe. The personal computer changed all that uniting the input, processing and output devices in a single machine.
Fedora 13 alpha has been released, and the faithful are encouraged to download, test and report. The traditional method of testing is to download a full CD iso image (about 700 MB), but if you read the recent post about Network booting with boot.fedoraproject.org, you’d have learned that all you now need to do to install any version of Fedora is to download a very small iso image (626 KB).
When that article was published, Fedora 13 had not yet been released, so the option to install it was not available in BFO. The screenshot below shows BFO’s installation page before the release of Fedora 13 alpha.
In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were “stepping all over Apple’s IP.” (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, “I’ll just sue you.”
My response was simple. “Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?” Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. “And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too.” Steve was silent.
In the future, getting a broadband connection might be as simple as flipping on a light switch. In fact, according to a group of researchers from Germany, the light coming from the lamps in your home could one day encode a wireless broadband signal.
As of now, the majority of wireless in homes and businesses is achieved through a radio-frequency WiFi connection. But WiFi has limited bandwidth, and it’s unclear where to find more in the already-crowded radio spectrum. By contrast, visible-frequency wireless has all the bandwidth one could want.
