Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Asus is the second company this week to support the unlocking of bootloaders. HTC faced a consumer backlash in May over the locked bootloaders in its devices, but on December 29 the company released a tool to unlock the bootloaders in some phones and tablets.

The incident that prompted Newman and Feldman’s analysis was the removal from the internet of the Sweet 16, a freely available clinical assessment tool used by physicians to screen patients for cognitive problems. The tool was taken down because of legal action by the creators of a similar tool called the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Clinical tools tend to resemble one another, Newman said, “not because their creators are unoriginal, but because the tools are based on the same research and the same science.”

The result of this goodwill "piracy" is nothing short of tragic. As time and goodwill are swiftly "stolen" by house guests, the host's direct family often finds itself having to do without. At best, they can only hope to have a few moments between meals and Immigration raids to angrily discuss efforts to block the rogue infringers, perhaps by seizing the guest bedroom and posting a sternly-worded warning on the door.

The real beauty of open source software isn’t that it’s free; it’s that it’s free to change. Developers can tinker with it, strip it down or build it out, depending on their wants and needs.

In the case of Google’s Android, this increasingly means that we don’t have one Android operating system. Instead, we have a family of different Android forks and flavors.

Even to call Android “fragmented” assumes that it was or ought to be unified and singular from the beginning. It makes more sense to start talking about “Android-compatible” devices, rather than Android.

But, despite the backing of a coalition of powerful tech companies, the bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was dead on arrival, never even getting a hearing before the committee Leahy heads.

In contrast, another proposal sailed through Leahy’s committee, less than two weeks after Leahy and others floated it at about the same time as his ECPA reform measure. That bill, known as the Protect IP Act, was anti-piracy legislation long sought by Hollywood that dramatically increased the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites “dedicated to infringing activities.”

This dichotomy played itself out over and again in 2011, as lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — turned a blind eye to important civil liberties issues, including Patriot Act reform, and instead paid heed to the content industry’s desires to stop piracy.

"Patent lawsuit filed against Android" has become a distressingly familiar headline for Google and its hardware partners. With Microsoft signing license agreements covering more than 50 percent of Android phones, Apple working the courts to block sales of HTC and Samsung devices, and various lawsuits launched by rivals from Oracle to BT, the Android mobile operating system is stumbling through a legal minefield.

Samsung may be rethinking its decision not to bring Android 4 to the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab (hat tip to The Verge). After the company's announcement that neither device could be updated due to the size of Samsung's TouchWiz interface, the company is reportedly considering backing down on its decision due to "strong customer demand."

The International Trade Commission has given Microsoft a partial victory with its initial ruling on the patent infringement claims the software giant lodged against Motorola in October 2010. The ITC judge has determined that Motorola infringes four separate claims in one of the seven (originally nine) patents that Microsoft named in its complaint. The judge has not found evidence of infringement of the other six patents.

The pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) continues to inspire opponents to come up with creative solutions to circumvent it. A new anti-SOPA add-on for Firefox, titled “DeSopa,” is such a counter measure. When installed, users can click a single button to resolve a blocked domain via foreign DNS servers, bypassing all domestic DNS blockades and allowing the user to browse the site though the bare IP-address (if supported). “I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe,” DeSopa developer T Rizk told TorrentFreak.

The International Trade Commission handed down a ruling on Monday saying that several of HTC's smartphones infringed on an Apple patent and would be subject to an import ban beginning in April 2012. The case is important for Apple, as it is the first substantive ruling that Android devices definitively infringe on an Apple patent. Despite this, however, the end result of this particular ruling may have little material effect on HTC, Google, or other handset makers—HTC says it plans to remove the offending feature, and there's plenty of time to do so before the ban kicks in.

It appears that Apple has made a deal with patent troll Digitude Innnovations to help the company's efforts to sue nearly every major mobile device maker. Digitude earlier this month launched one of its first legal attacks against Nokia, RIM, Motorola, HTC, LG, Samsung, Sony, and even Amazon, filing a patent infringement claim with the International Trade Commission. Conspicuously absent from that list is iPhone maker Apple, which until late November owned two of the patents being used to target "certain mobile devices" from its competitors.

Haavard's conclusion is that there is a pattern of behavior here; that Apple is trying to disrupt the standards process with its patent claims. He references the touch specification in particular—this is plainly an area where Apple has lots of expertise and interest in the technology, but the company opted out of working on the specification. If Apple had worked on the specification, it would have had to disclose sooner and offer licensing, and Haavard believes that avoiding this commitment is why Apple refused to work on the specification.

Motorola Mobility on Thursday won an important injunction against Apple in Germany, which could potentially bar Apple's European sales arm from selling iPhones and 3G-equipped iPads. At issue is a Motorola patent for cellular data transmission, part of wireless data transmission standards that are encumbered by an agreement to license the patent on "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms. The ruling suggests that, at least in Germany, raising a FRAND defense against standards-essential patent infringement claims could be a difficult proposition, and may force Apple to accept Motorola's licensing terms—FRAND or not—for "past infringement."

In a statement issued today, HP said that the underlying webOS code will be published under an open source license. The company will continue to play an active role in funding and developing the platform. Ongoing development will be undertaken in collaboration with the open source software community and other interested parties through a "good, transparent and inclusive governance" model.

Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for LXer called "A Brief History of Microsoft FUD". This ran through successive attempts by Microsoft to dismiss GNU/Linux in various ways. One of the better-known was a series of "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) studies. By an amazing coincidence, these all showed that Microsoft Windows was cheaper than that supposedly cheap GNU/Linux. Fortunately, people soon cottoned on to the fact that these studies, paid for by Microsoft, were pretty worthless (here, for example, is a great debunking of the kind of FUD that was being put out in 2005.) However, one knock-on consequence of that episode is that TCO studies rather fell from favour. So it's interesting to see this new report prepared for the Cabinet Office with the title "Total Cost of Ownership of Open Source Software", which has been released under the liberal Open Government Licence for public sector information.

Ever want to know exactly why it takes so long to push the latest Android operating system release to your phone? Motorola and Sony Ericsson attempted to explain it on Wednesday.

With some funding from Google and the U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line utilities to handle more complex types of data. Such updates are needed because "we now tend to have more model-based configuration languages that have meaningful constructs spanning more than one line," said Gabriel Weaver, a Dartmouth graduate student who, along with Dartmouth computer science professor Sean Smith, is creating the variants of grep and diff. Weaver presented the new utilities at a poster session at the Usenix Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference, being held this week in Boston.

Shuttleworth's successful record in business means that his words ought to carry more weight with supporters of patent monopolies than they might if he were just a free software project leader. After all, in a world where money talks, half a billion dollars just dismissed the patent system as a "sham."

"So I thought I found your porn folder, in calendar/backup/PORN..."

In my last article, I looked at some of the ways in which you can use Vimscript, Vim‘s built-in scripting language, to set up that text editor to do exactly what you want it to. Apparently you liked what you saw and asked for more, so here are some additional tips and tricks to help you get Vim to jump through the hoops of your choice, including techniques for specifying ranges to work on, accepting user input, and debugging.