Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Keurig is setting itself up to attempt a type of coffee "DRM" on the pods used in its coffee-making machines, according to a report from Techdirt. Keurig's next-gen machines would be unable to interact with third-party coffee pods, thus locking customers into buying only the Keurig-branded K-cups or those of approved partners.

Public Knowledge is back at it, carving holes in dubious software patent claims by distilling supposedly "complex" ideas into a minimal amount of code. Late last year, Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit involving Ultramercial, whose disputed patent basically involved appending "on the internet" to a very basic idea.

In common with every other ARM-based SoC, using the VideoCore IV 3d graphics core on the Pi requires a block of closed-source binary driver code (a “blob”) which talks to the hardware. In our case, this blob runs on the VPU vector processor of the BCM2835 (the SOC or System On a Chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi); our existing open-source graphics drivers are a thin shim running on the ARM11, which talks to that blob via a communication driver in the Linux kernel. The lack of true open-source graphics drivers and documentation is widely acknowledged to be a significant problem for Linux on ARM, as it prevents users from fixing driver bugs, adding features and generally understanding what their hardware is doing.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, with help from chipmaker Broadcom, is laying out a path toward an open source graphics driver for the tiny computer. Broadcom today "announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license," Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton wrote in a blog post.

The reasoning doesn't really matter. There's no reason that continued online support for these consoles should be at the whim of a company that obviously has no financial interest in them anymore. Nintendo and other console and game makers should take steps to release versions of their server code that allow players to run their own online infrastructure after the corporate servers are no longer available.

Some advocates of network neutrality, the concept that Internet service providers should treat all traffic equally, argued that a lack of competition and regulation in US broadband will make it easy for ISPs to demand additional payments while threatening to degrade traffic.

When ISPs and video providers fight over money, Internet users suffer. Tim Wu, a professor who coined the phrase "network neutrality," warned in The New Yorker that Netflix paying Comcast "sets a bad precedent—it will embolden Comcast to extract more tolls from any popular Web company that wants to reach its broadband customers and fears degradation of service."

The American judicial system has long held to a general principle that each party in a dispute should pay for its own legal fees, win or lose.

But when is a lawsuit—in particular, a patent lawsuit—so egregious that an exception should be made? And which judges are best suited to make that decision? That's the question that the US Supreme Court will grapple with on Wednesday as it hears two related cases: Octane Fitness v. Icon Health and Fitness and Highmark v. Allcare Management Systems.

In Barcelona today, Nokia not for the first time laid out its plans to capture the next billion smartphone users. The new approach: Nokia X, a third line of smartphones to slot between the low-end Asha and the high-end Lumia range. The Nokia X range will run the Andrcusoid Open Source Project (AOSP) operating system, but without Google's stack on top of it. Instead, it'll have a Nokia store, Microsoft services, and a custom front-end.

We're going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin.

The intent of moving application-specific menus into the global menu bar was to leave more room for content in applications. But even for people who liked the design, it has grown more problematic over time with the proliferation of bigger monitors, according to Canonical employee Marco Trevisan. The Ubuntu desktop team is bringing the application windows back into the application windows themselves for the 14.04 release in April this year, Trevisan wrote today.

Researchers say they have uncovered an ongoing attack that infects home and small-office wireless routers from Linksys with self-replicating malware, most likely by exploiting a code-execution vulnerability in the device firmware.

There may be no song more widely sung in America than "Happy Birthday," but it isn't free to sing. Warner Chappell music licensing, which has long claimed copyright to the words, typically dings filmmakers and TV produces a few thousands bucks for a "synchronization license" anytime the song is used in video. Warner reported that by the 1990s the "Happy Birthday" licensing enterprise was pulling in upwards of $2 million annually.

Recently the topic of systemd has come up quite a bit in various communities in which I'm involved, including the musl IRC channel and on the Busybox mailing list. While the attitude towards systemd in these communities is largely negative, much of what I've seen has been either dismissable by folks in different circles as mere conservatism, or tempered by an idea that despite its flaws, "the design is sound". This latter view comes with the notion that systemd's flaws are fixable without scrapping it or otherwise incurring major costs, and therefore not a major obstacle to adopting systemd.

My view is that this idea is wrong: systemd is broken by design, and despite offering highly enticing improvements over legacy init systems, it also brings major regressions in terms of many of the areas Linux is expected to excel: security, stability, and not having to reboot to upgrade your system.

Verizon customers have been complaining about poor Netflix performance lately, so the numbers aren't necessarily a surprise. Determining the actual cause of such performance slowdowns is never easy, though. That the latest performance complaints came after Verizon's win over the FCC in a court battle over net neutrality rules led to claims that Verizon was celebrating its victory by throttling Netflix traffic.

From the files of J. K. Rowling.

Dear Ms. Rowling,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We will be happy to consider it for publication. However we have some concerns about the excessive length of this manuscript. We usually handle works of 5-20 pages, sometimes as much as 30 pages. Your 1337-page manuscript exceeds these limits, and requires some trimming.

We suggest that this rather wide-ranging work could usefully be split into a number of smaller, more tightly focussed, papers. In particular, we feel that the “magic” theme is not appropriate for our venue, and should be excised from the current submission. Assuming you are happy to make these changes, we will be pleased to work with you on this project.

We've written about the problems of DRM and anti-circumvention laws since basically when we started way back in 1997. Cory Doctorow has been writing about the same stuff for just about as long (or perhaps longer). And yet, just when you think everything that can be said about this stuff has been said, Doctorow comes along and writes what may be the best column describing why DRM, combined with anti-circumvention laws, is so incredibly nefarious. Read the whole thing. It's so well done, and so important, I'm actually going to write two posts about it, because there are two separate issues that deserve highlighting.

I've already written one piece about Cory Doctorow's incredible column at the Guardian concerning digital rights management and anti-circumvention, in which I focused on how the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws allows companies to make up their own copyright laws in a way that removes the rights of the public. But there's a second important point in Doctorow's piece and it's that the combination of DRM and anti-circumvention laws make all of our computers less safe. For this to make sense, you need to understand that DRM is really a form of security software.

The patent system is completely broken. Towards the end of 2012, we wrote about how a patent troll named Vringo, using some patents (6,314,420 and 6,775,664), had won a lawsuit against Google. Vringo was a failed ringtone company that had bought those highly questionable patents from the failed search engine Lycos and then sued basically everyone who ran a search engine. Microsoft agreed to settle (with a bizarre stipulation promising to pay 5% of whatever Google finally had to pay), while Google agreed to indemnify a bunch of the others that were all using Google's search under their own.

One of the drawbacks of buying a barebones PC like Intel’s NUC—at least if you’re a Windows user—is that it comes with no operating system. The big PC OEMs get Windows at a steep discount compared to end users, and you’ll have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 for a full OEM Windows license (and more if you want a retail version with tech support)...

... Many Windows computers include features like Fastboot or Secure Boot that need to be disabled or circumvented to use Linux in UEFI mode, and while the NUC supports these features for Windows, they aren’t enabled by default. Installing Linux on the NUC should have been the easiest part of the whole process, but for most of our distributions it ended up being a gigantic pain, and that comes down to the NUC's EFI implementation.

Last fall, we wrote about how the BSA, the Business Software Alliance, famous for being basically a Microsoft-front organization whose main job is to publish absolutely, hilariously misleading "piracy" numbers each year, had been taking on the issue of the so called "covered business method (CBM) patent" program that was being pushed in patent reform. The covered business method patent program is pretty straightforward. It allows certain types of patents -- currently financial patents -- to undergo a faster review, allowing the USPTO to dump bad patents faster.