Archive for the ‘miscellaneous’ Category
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.
Hi, I am Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. I am honored to have been appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve in this new position created by Congress in the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008. Given the unique nature of this job, I’d like to describe what I’m doing in my office and how we want to engage the public to get input on what we, as a government, should be doing.
While talking about our global competitive advantage at a recent town hall meeting in Ohio, the President said, “One of the problems that we have had is insufficient protection for intellectual property rights”–and it is important that our ideas are protected. In December 2009, the Vice President, joined by Cabinet members and other senior government officials, held a roundtable discussion to emphasize the Administration’s commitment to enforcing laws against intellectual property theft.
Microsoft’s XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI).
The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government.
For the Norwegian government, PDF is the recommended file format for publishing noneditable files, while Open Document Format (ODF), the native file format of productivity suites including the open-source OpenOffice.org, is the recommended format for publishing editable files. Versions of PDF, ODF and OOXML have all been adopted as international standards by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO).
Guess why Microsoft suddenly decided it wanted to be more interoperable? It’s so it can get customers to quit using Linux and switch to Windows & .NET.
Exhibit 7068 [PDF] in the Comes v. Microsoft antitrust litigation exhibits list tells us what happened with Intel. It is a 4-page email thread with Bill Gates and others at Microsoft all about trying to get Intel to switch from Linux/Unix to Windows for their development environment. Gates calls it a jihad. What stood in the way, according to the email report on what Intel was telling them: “Linux apparently meets over 90% of their current EDA needs.” Intel said Linux interoperability was better, they could port code more easily, EDA ISVs “got burnt with poor experiences with Windows NT” and so were “wary of taking steps in this direction”.
It’s the dawn of a new year. From our perch on the frontier of electronic civil liberties, EFF has collected a list of a dozen important trends in law, technology and business that we think will play a significant role in shaping online rights in 2010.
In December, we’ll revisit this post and see how it all worked out.
1. Attacks on Cryptography: New Avenues for Intercepting Communications
In 2010, several problems with cryptography implementations should come to the fore, showing that even encrypted communications aren’t as safe as users expect. Two of the most significant problems we expect concern cellphone security and web browser security.
GSM, the technology that underpins most cellphone communications around the world, uses a deeply flawed security technology. In 2010, devices which intercept phone calls will get cheaper and cheaper. Expect to see public demonstrations of the ability to break GSM’s encryption and intercept mobile phone calls. We hope that this will prompt the mobile phone industry to replace its obsolete systems with modern and easy-to-use cryptography.
By Corynne McSherry: Sometimes an idea is so blindingly, obviously good that you have to wonder why it hasn’t already been implemented.
A few years ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had an idea like that. Why not create a free, public, online archive of findings from research studies that were funded by Americans’ tax dollars? That way, members of the public could keep up to date on the latest health findings by reading about discoveries that they paid for and would otherwise be unable to access.
Abstract
An open source foundation is a group of people and companies that has come together to jointly develop community open source software. Examples include the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Gnome Foundation.
There are many reasons why software development firms join and support a foundation. One common economic motivation is to save costs in the development of the software by spreading them over the participating parties. However, this is just the beginning. Beyond sharing costs, participating firms can increase their revenue through the provision and increased sale of complementary products. Also, by establishing a successful open source platform, software firms can compete more effectively across technology stacks and thereby increase their addressable market. Not to be neglected, community open source software is a common good, creating increased general welfare and hence goodwill for the involved companies.
By Tal Schechter: 
What if buying a new car were like using nonfree software? While the following example may seem a little far-fetched, it is a pretty good analogy to understand the importance of user freedoms in software.
Imagine going out to buy a new car. After deciding on a brand, you go to that dealer and start looking at what they have to offer. You decide on a model you like, and the salesman tries to sell you on all sorts of things you don’t need and some things that really you are not sure about. Undercoating? Is that necessary? After making an agreement with the dealer, you are handed your key.
by Richard M. Stallman: Many in our community are suspicious of the CodePlex Foundation. With its board of directors dominated by Microsoft employees and ex-employees, plus apologist Miguel de Icaza, there is plenty of reason to be wary of the organization. But that doesn’t prove its actions will be bad.
Someday we will be able to judge the organization by its actions (including its public relations). Today we can only try to anticipate what it will do, based on its statements and Microsoft’s statements.
On April 1st, the Conficker worm, perhaps the most wide-spread malware program in history, is set to activate. We don’t know what Conficker will do, but it’s a safe bet it won’t be anything nice to the hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs that have been infected with it. Will it strip out every credit-card number within these PCs? Launch a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack? Subscribe you to PETA porn!? We don’t know.
Is the government spying on you? Want to do something about it? Right, bet you do. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a number of solutions for you. Since 1990 (when it was founded as a non-profit organization), the EFF has being fighting to defend your digital rights. This week, the EFF launched a campaign designed to “educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.”
On occasion, you will see the advice that the ext3 file system is not suitable for Solid State Disks (SSD’s) due to the extra writes caused by journaling — and so Linux users using SSD’s should use ext2 instead. However, is this folk wisdom actually true? This weekend, I decided to measure exactly what the write overhead of journaling actually is in actual practice.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Cisco. The FSF’s complaint alleges that in the course of distributing various products under the Linksys brand Cisco has violated the licenses of many programs on which the FSF holds copyright, including GCC, binutils, and the GNU C Library. In doing so, Cisco has denied its users their right to share and modify the software.
Keith Curtis has just written a book about the future of software. That in itself isn’t unique. More unusual is that Mr. Curtis, an 11-year veteran of Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, believes deeply that open source is the future of software.
