Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

The UN's Internet Governance Forum had a gathering to discuss rethinking copyright, in which WIPO made the case that it should lead "multi-stakeholder" discussions on how to reform copyright. WIPO, of course, has a history of having a rather one-sided view of copyright and who the "stakeholders" are.

Currently, there are four major types of e-voting around the world that are worth keeping an eye on: Brazil’s homegrown direct recording electronic (DRE) setup, Australia’s open-source software, Estonia’s Internet voting, and a Spanish startup’s efforts to expand what’s been called "crypto-voting." Each of these approaches has its own unique set of problems, but the primary obstacles they present for many voting officials and computer scientists is their lack of ability to verify source code and expense.

This article shows how to set up Compiz in Xubuntu (w/ Xfce) 12.10 or 12.04. I've tested the instructions below on Xubuntu 12.10, but they should work on Xubuntu 12.04 as well - there are some minor differences which I've explained below.

Before proceeding, please note that to be able to use Compiz, you'll obviously need a 3D capable graphics card and drivers.

Let's get started!

Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users – which in our society, is most people – need software to be free of patents.

The patents that threaten us are often called “software patents,” but that term is misleading. Such patents are not about any specific program. Rather, each patent describes some practical idea, and says that anyone carrying out the idea can be sued. So it’s clearer to call them “computational idea patents.”

According to Surden, big data networks persistently chip away at privacy interests and expand the surveillance society’s reach — and we’re about to see a lot more of it. Surden argues that privacy is safeguarded by barriers that make it hard for others to thwart our interest in limiting access to information. Bring down these walls — which Surden calls constraints — and prying eyes can capitalize on newfound vulnerability. Accordingly, we need to reassess how we think about our privacy rights, and what personal information should be included in that class.

In a decisive twist to the sprawling smartphone wars, it appears the government intends to sue some of the participants over their use of patents. The first targets won't be the companies that initiated the battles, though—companies like Apple, Kodak, and Microsoft that have gone on the offensive. Instead, it looks like Google and possibly Samsung could be the targets of government lawsuits. Staffers at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have formally recommended the government bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. Now FTC commissioners will have to decide whether to whether to act on that recommendation. A decision will likely come after the presidential election on November 6.

The problem is Google's use of so-called standards-essential patents. Those are patents it has already disclosed to a standards-setting body as being important to the functioning of some type of technology standard.

A UK judge was unamused by Apple's interpretation of an order requiring the company to publicly acknowledge that Samsung didn't copy Apple's designs. On Thursday, the UK Court of Appeal gave Apple a slap on the wrist for the notice it posted earlier this week, which used a direct quote from High Court Judge Colin Birss saying Samsung's tablets were "not as cool" as Apple's. Apple now has 24 to 48 hours (depending on which source you read) to post an updated statement, perhaps this time with a little less snark. "I’m at a loss that a company such as Apple would do this," Judge Robin Jacob said during a hearing in London on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. "That is a plain breach of the order."

First, let's address the idea that the Linux desktop's time is now. It's an easy kill, honestly—despite the ever-improving functionality of distributions such as Ubuntu, they hardly show up as a blip in global operating system market share statistics. Linux accounts for just 1.1 percent of the desktop operating systems in the world, based on statistics from NetMarketshare. By comparison, Windows systems own 91 percent of the market worldwide; OS X has 7 percent. Now, a big chunk of that Windows market share—anywhere from a third to almost half—is Windows XP. And, the reasoning goes, with XP now at the end of its support life, those XP users have to go somewhere. Why not to Linux?

GnuPG stands for GNU Privacy Guard. GnuPG is an open implementation of OpenPGP ( Pretty Good Privacy ) standard as defined in RFC 4880. In this article we will cover the installation and the basics of generating keys using gnupg. This article is part of our ongoing series on Cryptography. If you are new to cryptography, refer to our earlier article on Introduction to Cryptography.

We've written about patent trolling giant Intellectual Ventures many times, including how it is notoriously secretive about almost everything. Its deals with companies (often involving them forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to not get sued) are hidden away behind strict non-disclosure agreements. It also hides the various patents in over 1,000 shell companies. At other times it "sells" patents to independent trolls, but most people believe that it still gets a cut of any revenue that comes out of those trolling operations. An operation called IP Checkups -- a "patent analytics firm" -- is trying to shine some more light on IV's secret patent portfolio and has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money to investigate the company's patents.

There are plenty of discussions about the problem of patent trolls, but if you think that's the only problem with the patent system, you haven't been paying attention. There have been a ton of major clashes going on between big companies, spending billions buying up patents, suing each other... and not putting that money into innovation or lower prices. So it's nice to see Cisco CEO John Chambers speak out against the patent system by calling out both the trolls and the big tech companies for abusing the system and hindering innovation.

Arguing against the takedown of a 29-second home video portraying a toddler dancing might have been a slam dunk from a PR perspective; legally speaking, it's been anything but. EFF was looking for a case that was so obviously an example of "fair use" that the content owner who initiated the takedown could actually be forced to pay damages, under a little-used section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 512(f). But the bar is very high to get that type of relief. That became crystal clear at the most important hearing in the case thus far, held today in San Jose.

The case was extraordinary in part because DDR was suing Digital River, an e-commerce company whose business not only pre-dated its patent by more than two years, but thrived in the marketplace; last year Digital River made almost $300 million in revenue. (That includes lines of business that weren't accused in this lawsuit.) By contrast, the dot-com started by the Rosses, Nexchange, was never profitable and went bust in 2000, as soon as it couldn't access more venture capital. Whatever the legal merits of its technology, Digital River had 1,000 clients by the end of 1997; that's more than 20 times the number of merchants Nexchange was working with when it went out of business in 2000.

Poor 3D support and lack of OS integration features hurt VirtualBox the most. Our Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion shootout took a deep dive into the two most successful commercial virtualization products for the Mac, but many of you had questions about VirtualBox, the free and open source desktop virtualization software currently offered by Oracle. Both Parallels and VMware offer plenty of features for home and business users, but is VirtualBox an acceptable alternative for the cash-strapped?

In late June, following a lawsuit filed by Apple earlier this year, a California court granted an injunction against Samsung that banned the sale of the Galaxy Nexus in the United States. The two companies have been undergoing a massive worldwide judicial battle over patents for several months. “We hold that the district court abused its discretion in determining that Apple established a sufficient causal nexus,” the court wrote on Thursday.

The slide that defense lawyers showed to the jury read: “This isn’t new.” In a patent case, it could have been a smoking gun—after all, it was written by the inventors themselves. They were describing their business, Nexchange, to a San Francisco conference back in 2000; it was three years before they received their first patent and turned their focus to litigation. But hours later, inventor Daniel “Del” Ross Jr. was on the stand, and he seemed none too concerned that the crux of his idea was old—if not ancient. He had a patent, twice reviewed by the US Patent Office, and a simple story to tell: “The big difference is, we invented this for the Internet,” he told the jury.

Last year, we wrote about a crazy patent troll, named Innovatio, who had sued a ton of restaurants and hotels, claiming that anyone who used WiFi was violating its patents. It was even claiming that individuals who use WiFi at home infringed too -- but that it wouldn't go after them "at this time." Instead, it preferred to focus on shaking down tons of small businesses, offering to settle for $2,500 to $3,000 -- which is cheaper than hiring a lawyer to fight it, no matter how bogus. We noted at the time that Motorola and Cisco had gone to court to try to get a declaratory judgment to protect its customers. Well, it seems that the effort to stop these lawsuits has been taken to the next level. Cisco, Motorola and Netgear have now filed an amended complaint which rips Innovatio apart, and doesn't just seek a declaratory judgment of non-infringement, but outlines a parade of lawbreaking by Innovatio...

Mr. Ricci issued an ultimatum: Mr. Phillips could sell his firm to Mr. Ricci or be sued for patent infringements. When Mr. Phillips refused to sell, Mr. Ricci’s company filed the first of six lawsuits. Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees. When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. Phillips won. In the companies’ only courtroom face-off, a jury ruled that Mr. Phillips had not infringed on a broad voice recognition patent owned by Mr. Ricci’s company. But it was too late. The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done. In December, Mr. Phillips agreed to sell his company to Mr. Ricci. “We were on the brink of changing the world before we got stuck in this legal muck,” Mr. Phillips said.

One of the most heartening developments recently has been Africa's current embrace of computer technology. That includes open source: for example, Nigeria has been running an open source conference for several years now, and the Kenyan government is starting to deploy free software widely.

Sadly, this increasing interest in open source has called forth something far less welcome: Microsoft FUD against it:

Version 3.7 of the Linux kernel will be the first to support multiple versions of the ARM processor—a starting point toward a much-needed consolidation of Linux support for the system-on-a-chip architecture. In the long run, the changes could mean broader support for ARM by popular Linux distributions, making it easier for developers to build versions for a broader variety of target devices—everything from enterprise servers based on massive arrays of ARM processors to tablets and smartphones. And other changes in the 3.7 kernel could make it more attractive for low-cost touch tablets and other mobile devices—as well as a hacker's replacement for Windows RT.