Topics

126

Non-Windows Software / Wolfram's Mathmatica ported to Raspberry Pi - free to install and use

« on: November 22, 2013, 12:09 PM »

Ok...Stephen Wolfram drives me bonkers at times. But Wolfram Research's decision to partner with the Pi Foundation and allow future releases of Rasperian OS to include both Mathmatica (and the previously mentioned here Wolfram Language) by default is a very generous and unexpected surprise.

And most surprising of all - it's completely free.

Here's the announcement:

The Wolfram Language and Mathematica on Raspberry Pi, for free

One of the best things about working on Raspberry Pi has been the opportunity to meet groups of people who are trying to bring about the same sort of change in the teaching of other subjects that we’re aiming for in computing. One great example is the computer-based math(s) (CBM) movement, which aims to redefine the teaching of mathematics in schools away from mechanical calculation and towards problem solving. From their website:

    

The importance of math to jobs, society, and thinking has exploded over the last few decades. Meanwhile, math education is in worldwide crisis—diverging more and more from what’s required by countries, industry, further education… and students.

    Computers are key to bridging this chasm: only when they do the calculating is math applicable to hard questions across many contexts. Real-life math has been transformed by computer-based calculation; now mainstream math education needs this fundamental change too.

    computerbasedmath.org is the project to perform this reset. We’re building a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart, while campaigning at all levels to redefine math education away from historical hand-calculating techniques and toward real-life problem-solving situations that drive high-concept math understanding and experience.

Today, at the CBM education summit in New York, we announced a partnership with Wolfram Research to bundle a free copy of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language into future Raspbian images. We believe this will make the Pi a first-class platform for teaching CBM techniques to children of all ages. As Conrad Wolfram said today: “Coders will be able to use the power of Mathematica’s maths out of the box, not only enriching what they can do but also showing off the power and importance of maths.”

Future Raspbian images will ship with the Wolfram Language and Mathematica by default; existing users with at least 600MB of free space on their SD card can install them today by typing:

   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wolfram-engine

You’ll find Mathematica in the app launcher under the Education menu.

We’d like to thank the team at Wolfram Research for the enormous amount of effort they’ve put to get the Wolfram Language and Mathematica running well on the Pi. Over the next few months we’ll be running a series of blog posts from Wolfram exploring some of the neat tricks you can get up to with them. This is going to be fun!

This is pretty awesome considering an investment in a $50 Raspberry Pi starter kit bundle gives you access to Mathematica, one of the most powerful math software titles available. And it's even more awesome when you consider that a copy of Mathematica will set you back a minimum of @275 for the personal/home (not for professional use) edition running under Windows.

Pretty good deal if you ask me.

127

Living Room / LG SmartTV monitors your every move - including files on attached USB drives

« on: November 20, 2013, 11:28 AM »

You might have suspected some of this was going on. I certainly have.

But now here's LG definitively caught sending information gleaned about its set owners back to the mothership And doing so even though the hard to find opt-out option had been selected by the set owner. And to add further insult to injury, the data transmittals are unencrypted.

From the Techdirt article:

At this point, LG already has a bit of privacy problem. Sending data on channel selection is one thing. Collecting and sending unencrypted web data like search terms is quite another. And it gets even worse.

     It was at this point, I made an even more disturbing find within the packet data dumps. I noticed filenames were being posted to LG's servers and that these filenames were ones stored on my external USB hard drive.

DoctorBeet tested his hunch by mocking up an .avi file that would be immediately distinguishable from any other "normal" traffic. Plugging in a USB stick with the bait (Midget_Porn_2013.avi) into his TV, DoctorBeet soon saw data on his faux porn headed to LG's servers in unencrypted plain text. DoctorBeet (and his shocked wife) also watched his children's names being harvested from the file name of a Christmas video located on another connected drive

Too long and detailed a report to summarize. So hie thee over to Techdirt to get the rest of this story. (Link here.)

 

128

Non-Windows Software / *NIX: New Linux magazine startup campaign on Indiegogo

« on: November 19, 2013, 06:39 AM »

Three of the leading lights over at Linux Format have left the Future Publishing stable and set out to create a new Linux magazine called Linux Voice.

The campaign is up on Indiegogo - link here.

Some interesting ideas, including a plan to release all their published content for free no later than 90 days after its original publication. (Something that is going to create major problems for them if they plan on recruiting 'guest' writers btw!)

Unfortunately, it currently looks very iffy. As of 11/19 they have managed to raise only 42% of their targeted £90K goal. And with only 35 days left in their campaign.

I'd give them a 1 in 10 chance of making it unless some angel investor comes along. A hope that is very unlikely to pan out in light of that 'free after 9-month' concept they've proposed. And therein lies the problem I see so often with this sort of thing:

• GNU/FOSS philosophy is NOT a business model
• Publishing IS a business

Therefor...(the conclusion will be left as an exercise for the reader)


Oh well. I wish them luck. Linux Format is (or maybe was with them gone?) a good magazine. And these guys have a track record for being solid tech writers. Let's hope this campaign isn't their collective swan song.

129

General Software Discussion / Heeee's Baaaaack!!! Stephen Wolfram is going to revolutionize everything again.

« on: November 15, 2013, 05:27 PM »

Ok...the guy who brought us the Wolfram Alpha search engine, and that wonderful book A New Kind of Science, is now about to introduce a new programming language, modestly and creatively named The Wolfram Language.

Here's how he gushes about describes this latest marvel in his blog:

   
Something Very Big Is Coming: Our Most Important Technology Project Yet
November 13, 2013

Computational knowledge. Symbolic programming. Algorithm automation. Dynamic interactivity. Natural language. Computable documents. The cloud. Connected devices. Symbolic ontology. Algorithm discovery. These are all things we’ve been energetically working on—mostly for years—in the context of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, CDF and so on.

But recently something amazing has happened. We’ve figured out how to take all these threads, and all the technology we’ve built, to create something at a whole different level. The power of what is emerging continues to surprise me. But already I think it’s clear that it’s going to be profoundly important in the technological world, and beyond.

At some level it’s a vast unified web of technology that builds on what we’ve created over the past quarter century. At some level it’s an intellectual structure that actualizes a new computational view of the world. And at some level it’s a practical system and framework that’s going to be a fount of incredibly useful new services and products.

I have to admit I didn’t entirely see it coming. For years I have gradually understood more and more about what the paradigms we’ve created make possible. But what snuck up on me is a breathtaking new level of unification—that lets one begin to see that all the things we’ve achieved in the past 25+ years are just steps on a path to something much bigger and more important.

Something big is coming...

I’m not going to be able to explain everything in this blog post (let’s hope it doesn’t ultimately take something as long as A New Kind of Science to do so!). But I’m excited to begin to share some of what’s been happening. And over the months to come I look forward to describing some of the spectacular things we’re creating—and making them widely available.

It’s hard to foresee the ultimate consequences of what we’re doing. But the beginning is to provide a way to inject sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything—and to make it universally accessible to humans, programs and machines, in a way that lets all of them interact at a vastly richer and higher level than ever before.

A crucial building block of all this is what we’re calling the Wolfram Language.

<more>

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or ask for some of whatever it is he's drinking or smoking this week...

Oh well...time will tell I suppose. Just like it did before. 

Link to Wolfram's blog article here.

130

General Software Discussion / Manually recovering text from corrupt MS Word DOC and DOCX files

« on: November 15, 2013, 08:46 AM »

Ever get one of these?



Ever get one of these and then have the suggested repair option fail?

Igor has posted his first in a promised series of tutorials over at Dedoimedo that might come in handy some day:

How to recover corrupt Microsoft Word files
Updated: November 11, 2013

This is a hot topic. A very hot topic. What do you do if you have several Word files, either saved as .doc or .docx, which no longer open? You do not have backups, which you should, or perhaps the backups are corrupt, too? How do you gain back the long page after page of valuable text? This article will help you with this unpleasant task.

I will show you two somewhat unusual methods of recovering contents of your files. The success is not guaranteed, and your final formatting might not be preserved. But you will definitely be able to save your text, which ought to be the most important part. Best of all, Linux to the rescue! We will use Linux to do some of the recovery work. Follow me.

Expectations

Let's align expectations upfront. File recovery is a tedious guesswork. Sometimes, it will work, sometimes it won't. You can make a best effort to retrieve the data, but it may really not be there. If data has been overwritten with nonsense, you will not be able to reassemble what was lost, ever. For instance, if a certain file has zeros accidentally written in its middle, the bytes that represent actual content will be gone.

Moreover, what I am showing you here is an incomplete workaround. There's no exact science, and most likely, no two cases will ever be quite the same. On top of that, some basic expertise is needed, including the ability to use regular expressions to some extent. The Linux requirement can also make it more difficult for most Windows users. However, between the tough choice of losing everything and hopefully recovering 50-70% of your missing stuff, you should definitely give this tutorial a try. It's free, it's non-destructive, so you can always try expensive professional services later on. There's always time to give someone your money.
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I will be spending the coming months breaking and corrupting Word files in all sorts of ways, to see if I can find anything that can be of generic use for a wide population of my readers and their friends and family. Be patient, the tutorial shall yet arrive, from out of fire and smoke of despair. Or something like that.

<more>

Knew some of this. But I also picked up a few things I didn't. Definitely worth the read.

Article link here.

 

131

Living Room / The most disturbing news story I've read all year

« on: November 14, 2013, 12:41 PM »

In Orwell's dystopian 1984, Inner Party aparatchik O'Brien makes the now famous comment: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” in reference to the Ministry of Truth's constant reediting of records and news stories to "correct errors" and bring history "into alignment" with the present official truth.

Apparently, the practice has escaped the pages of fiction and has started making its way into the real world according to this story posted on Techdirt.

UK Political Party Tries To Dump 10 Years Of Speeches Down The Memory Hole
from the because-that-ALWAYS-works...-ALWAYS dept

Every so often a public figure will come to the dubious conclusion that the past can be erased. This was a difficult proposition even before the advent of the internet. These days, it's nearly impossible. But long odds rarely deter the particularly inspired… or particularly stupid.

Some abuse the easily-abusable laws in European countries to generate memory holes. Max Mosely has been fruitlessly pursuing the removal of so-called "not actually a Nazi orgy" photos for years. Others simply blunder around, issuing baseless legal threats and questionable DMCA notices. Others, like the UK Conservative Party, do their own dirty work.

Being willing to wipe your own collective memory takes a special kind of bravery, the kind often associated with reckless acts shortly preceded by the phrase, "Hold my beer."

pixelpusher220 was the first to send in the ComputerWeekly story which details the efforts the UK's Conservative Party recently made to eradicate an entire decade's worth of speeches from the internet.

    

The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.

    Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.

    But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.

All fine and dandy you may think. We still have The Internet Archives don't we? Nothing can ever be truly erased from the web as long as the IA saw it first, right?

Well...according to the article, the answer appears to be: Don't be so sure.

The Conservative Party did more than simply delete the speeches from its site. It also blocked out Google and the Internet Archive using an extensive addition to its robots.txt.
.
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So, how did it get the Internet Archive to remove its historical collection, something ComputerWeekly writer Mark Ballard likens to "sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park?"

Well, apparently the Internet Archive treats changes to robots.txt files as retroactively applicable. Once the bot blocker informed IA it was no longer welcome to crawl these pages, it erased the corresponding archives as a "matter of courtesy."

By making this change, the Conservative Party was able to eliminate 1,158 "snapshots" the Archive had gathered over the last 14 years, a rather breathtaking eradication accomplished without ever having to strong arm internet historians or stare down Google directly.

The Conservative Party has offered no comment on the slash-and-burn of its own history, simply saying it has passed along the query to its "website guy."  <more>

A very disturbing story...and harbinger of things to come once this bit of info makes its way into government circles. Especially those governments which claim to be most in support of "transparency."

132

Found Deals and Discounts / FarStone DriveClone - free on Tueday Nov 5, 2013

« on: November 05, 2013, 07:44 AM »

Courtesy of MostiWant comes news of a 1-day offer for a ('not bad' IMO) drive cloning utility for those not comfortable using something like the always free Clonezilla. Former users of tools such as TrueImage and similar software should feel right at home with the interface DriveClone uses.

FarStone DriveClone 10 Key Features:

    

• Professional Hard Drive and Solid State Drive Cloning & Migration
•    Smart Drive Cloning
•    Dissimilar Drive Cloning
•    Open File Cloning, Hard Links Cloning
•    Cloning without Interrupting Current Work
•    Create Mirror Drive
•    Create Backup Drive
•    Perfect Defrag Cloning
•    Volume Cloning
•    UEFI, GPT, 2TB, 2.5TB and 3TB Drive Cloning
•    Hardware RAID and Software RAID Cloning

FarStone DriveClone 10 Free Download Serial Number

FarStone DriveClone 10 Workstation is normally priced at $69.95 per serial number / activation key. Glarysoft are having a giveaway of FarStone DriveClone 10 Workstation edition, where everyone can download a full version copy for free. The giveaway will be valid for today only (24 hours on  November 5, 2013). Act fast to grab your free copy. Go to the giveaway page here to download the giveaway package.

Unzip the package you’ve downloaded, and carefully read the instructions which you can find in the readme.txt file. Follow the instructions carefully to install and activate the software. You have to install and activate it before the Giveaway offer for the software is over.

FYI,  FarStone DriveClone 10 is released with a free version for non-commercial users.  Here is the download page for FarStone DriveClone 10 Free Version: Download Page.

Download page here.

Grab your copy now. This deal ends today: 5-NOV-2013!

133

Living Room / Arduino Leonardo Touchboard

« on: November 05, 2013, 06:54 AM »

There's an interesting project recently posted on Kickstarter that looks promising for DIYers. I can see this becoming the reference platform for a variety of clever projects - especially homebrew musical instruments. (Note: it's already fully funded.) Great video on the project page. Find it here.

What is the Touch Board?

The Touch Board is a tool to make your projects interactive, responsive, smart or just fun. Use the Touch Board to change the world around you by turning almost any material or surface into a sensor. Connect anything conductive to one of its 12 electrodes and trigger a sound via its onboard MP3 player, play a MIDI note or do anything else that you might do with an Arduino or Arduino-compatible device.
The Touch Board!The Touch Board!

The Touch Board is designed as an easy-to-use platform for a huge range of projects, whether it's painting a lightswitch on your wall, making a paper piano or something nobody's thought of yet. Make sure to take a look at our video above and check out the information below. If you've got a question, get in touch and we'll get it up in the FAQs. We hope you'll support the Touch Board. We can't wait to see what you will build on top of this powerful platform!

 

134

Living Room / Was the iOS 7 "look" created using Microsoft Word?

« on: October 21, 2013, 12:35 PM »

This is just too clever for words - and also goes to show how much you can accomplish with how little provided you know your app inside out. Uber-designer Vaclav Krejci shows us how.

Ahoy*, my name is Václav Krejčí, and I have this crazy idea:

"Explain graphic design to everyday users using software they are already familiar with"

 

135

General Software Discussion / Free ebook available for download from Microsoft

« on: October 21, 2013, 11:15 AM »

You can download a free copy of Introducing Windows 8.1 for IT Professionals by Ed Bott.

Info and download link is here. No registration or other nonsense required to download.

I took a quick skim and it looks like it could be useful if you're an IT admin or Windows power user.

The Windows 8 product line represents a radical departure for Microsoft. A new user experience. A new app platform. New security features and new management tools. If you’re an IT pro, you have the daunting job of helping your users adapt to the newness of Windows 8.1 while you try to stay at least one step ahead.


Although I’ve written in-depth guides to Windows in the past, this book is not one of those. Nor do I pretend to offer much in the way of opinions or review. Only you can decide whether and how and when to incorporate Windows 8.1 into your enterprise, based on your own organizational requirements.


My goal in this book is to help you on that upgrade path by presenting the facts and features about Windows 8.1 as clearly as I can. If you’ve been living in an environment built around a previous version of Windows, you have a lot to absorb in the transition to Windows 8.1. I’ve tried to lay out those facts in as neutral a fashion as possible, starting with an overview of the operating system, explaining the many changes to the user experience, and diving deep into deployment and management tools where it’s necessary.


By design, this book focuses on things that are new, with a special emphasis on topics of interest to IT pros. So you might find fewer tips and tricks about the new user experience than your users want but more about management, deployment, and security—which ultimately is what matters to the long-term well-being of the company you work for.

136

Non-Windows Software / A real debate over Mir? This is gonna be good if it ever happens!

« on: October 20, 2013, 01:00 PM »

From the folks over at Phoronix:

Shuttleworth Challenged Over Mir Comments
Posted by Michael Larabel on October 19, 2013

On Friday when announcing the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS codename, Mark Shuttleworth ruffled some feathers by making some critical comments about the Linux users in opposition to Canonical's Mir Display Server. KDE's Aaron Siego has now challenged Mark to a public and live debate over Mir vs. Wayland.

The comments by Mark that were covered in the earlier Phoronix article claim that attacks against Mir are only on political grounds, calls them as the "Open Source Tea Party", say they suffer from the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and sharply criticizes systemd.

Aaron Siego of KDE, who is in support of Wayland, calls out Mark on his critical comments. Aaron has challenged Mark to a public, live, Internet debate to discuss these topics. The challenge was made via Aaron's Google+ page. There's plenty of comments on the page, including from Jono Bacon, Martin Gräßlin, and other open-source developers.

There's no word yet whether Mark will accept the debate.

137

Living Room / Am I the only person that has a real big problem with software like this?

« on: October 03, 2013, 07:57 PM »

Recently saw this on the alternativeTo website:

MobiPast
Free with limited functionality by Pierre Fontaine

Remotely monitor your children's mobiles. MobiPast allows you to secretly check the copy of their activities directly on mobipast application! Free functions: - GPS locations (FREE) See the GPS locations of the mobile device on a map. - Internet (FREE) Receive the history of websites visited from the mobile device. - Contacts (FREE) Receive the list of contacts saved on the mobile device. - Passcode (FREE) Capture the passcode to access to the mobile device...

 

138

Living Room / NASA puts first Curiosity Rover scientific papers behind a paywall?

« on: September 30, 2013, 03:23 PM »

This is an interesting one. NASA has published the first 5 papers on it's Curiosity Mars Rover. But they did it through Science Magazine - which promptly locked them behind their paywall - and demanded $20 for a one-day pass to read them.

Fortunately, biologist Michael Eisen of UC Berkeley is a little more up on copyright rules and relevant laws for US Government projects than either NASA or Science Magazine apparently are. Michael 'liberated' and put all 5 article PDFs up on his blog site for download along with a rather pointed essay discussing why NASA should know better (from both a legal and a public relations perspective) than to try something like that.

NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover, I am setting them free
By Michael Eisen | Published: September 26, 2013

The Mars Curiosity rover has been a huge boon for NASA – tapping into the public’s fascination with space exploration and the search for life on other planets. Its landing was watched live by millions of people, and interest in the photos and videos it is collecting is so great, that NASA has had to relocate its servers to deal with the capacity.

So what does NASA do to reward this outpouring of public interest (not to mention to $2.5 billion taxpayer dollars that made it possible)? They publish the first papers to arise from the project behind a Science magazine’s paywall...<more>

Apparently NASA got the message. Because the JPL has since re-published the same articles and made them freely available from their own website - where they should have been released to begin with.

Mike's blog post is really interesting and informative. There's several points he made that may be handy to remember if you're ever in a position where some government agency is attempting to freeze you out of reports and information you already paid them to produce with your tax dollars.

Read it here.

(With thanks to Boing Boing for spotting this!)

139

Living Room / What to do if threatened by a defamation suit

« on: September 27, 2013, 12:00 PM »

Sooner or later it happens. You posted what you felt was an honest and candid comment about somebody or something. Next thing your know, you're receiving shrill emails from somebody (not even somebody necessarily mentioned in you comment) who is threatening all sorts of legal action against you. Or even scarier, you made a negative remark about some company's product or service, and you receive an email a few days later from some law firm demanding you remove your post, issue a public apology, and turn over your domain to them (possibly with a certain number of dollars for their time and trouble) - or face banishment, a bad haircut, total destruction of all you hold dear in your life, and permanent revocation of your town library card.

What to do? What to do?

Attorney Ken White (chief ogre over at Popehat) posted a very good article on how to handle yourself - and what to do (and even more importantly not do) if you're ever receive a threat that somebody intends to file a "defamation" or "libel" suit against for something you (supposedly) said or posted online.

Link to the article is here. Ken has requested "no scraping" from his site. But I think I'm ok with quoting one brief section from his much longer article which I recommend reading in full.

...Criminal defense attorneys like me tell our clients about something we call the Martha Stewart Rule: lots of people get into trouble not because the did something wrong, but because they heard they were being investigated for doing something wrong, and they panicked and started lying and deleting files and setting cabinetry on fire and making angry statements to the press and generally venting their agitation. They go to jail for stuff they did when they lost control over themselves, or they go to jail because in their panic they generated new evidence of prior wrongdoing....

 

140

Living Room / The Constitution: Analysis & Interpretation available for download free

« on: September 18, 2013, 04:25 PM »

Your tax dollars at work - and the United States Library of Congress comes through with a 2830 page reference volume on the U.S. Constitution you can download (approx 21 Mb) for free!

From the Volokh Conspiracy law site comes this announcement:

Conan the Librarian
By Eugene Volokh on September 17, 2013 11:13 pm in Constitutional Law

The Library of Congress’s The Constitution: Analysis & Interpretation — a clause-by-clause treatise summarizing U.S. constitutional law and citing to relevant cases — is now out. (The URL is http://www.gpo.gov/f...f/GPO-CONAN-2013.pdf.) The PDF is huge; if it’s taking too long for you to load, go here and follow the link you need for the particular Article or Amendment. Thanks to Prof. Seth Tillman for the pointer.

Now you can know what you're talking about whenever you cite the U.S. Constitution. Right click here or in the link in the above quoted article and do a 'save as' to get your own local copy.

Awesome!

141

Living Room / Did Microsoft put a mole in Nokia?

« on: September 14, 2013, 01:29 PM »

Conspiracy fans of the world rejoice! This is an interesting speculation that will no doubt play out over the next year or two: Did Microsoft put a mole into Nokia with the intent of weakening the company enough to pave the way for Microsoft's planned acquisition of it?

The argument revolves around Stephen Elop (a former employee of Microsoft) who: left to become the first non-Finn CEO of Nokia, pulled Nokia out of the Linux development community, announced a shift to Microsoft for the "new" OS for Nokia's line of (till then) uber-successful smartphones, issued an extremely damaging "burning platform" memo about Nokia's products and product strategy that was 'mysteriously' leaked with predictable results, engineered the sale of Nokia to Microsoft - and will now be returning to Microsoft as head of its devices team following the sale.

This has raised the question: Did Stephen Elop ever really stop being a Microsoft employee - even when he was heading Nokia? Is it just possible that he was put in with the sole intent of crippling a successful company enough for Microsoft to devour it?

The Wikipedia shows this career timeline for Mr. Elop:

Elop was a director of consulting for Lotus Development Corporation before becoming CIO for Boston Chicken in 1992,[8][9] which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998.[10] In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department[9] and worked at the company for seven years,[11] where he held several senior positions, including CEO from January 2005[12] for three months before their acquisition by Adobe Systems was announced in April 2005.[5][13]

He was then president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, tendering his resignation in June 2006 and leaving in December,[14] after which he was the COO of Juniper Networks for exactly one year from January 2007-2008.[9][15]

From January 2008 to September 2010, Elop worked for Microsoft as the head of the Business Division, responsible for the Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics line of products, and as a member of the company's senior leadership team. It was during this time that Microsoft's Business Division released Office 2010.[16]

In September 2010, it was announced that Elop would take Nokia's CEO position, replacing Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, and becoming the first non-Finnish director in Nokia's history. On 11 March 2011 Nokia announced that it had paid Elop a $6 million signing bonus, “compensation for lost income from his prior employer," on top of his $1.4 million annual salary.[17]

On 3 September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's Devices and Services division for €3.79 billion ($4.99 billion at the time of the transaction). Elop stepped down as CEO of Nokia and will return to Microsoft as Head of Microsoft's Devices team.[18]

The discussions surrounding this along with the seemingly odd set of circumstances and decisions that led to Nokia faltering have been covered in two extremely interesting articles. Both are fairly long and worth reading in full.

If you're interested in following this story (and aren't part of the short attention span "TLDR" crowd) check out this article over at TechRights for a good pull-no-punches overview. Link here.

From TechRights:

Summary: Nokia officially assassinated by Microsoft, with a Canadian citizen who organised the coup now set to return to Microsoft’s headquarters


Stephen Elop never left Microsoft. We knew this all along. “Once the transition is finalized,” to quote Wikipedia, “Elop will become an Executive Vice President at Microsoft.” Elop was an appalling, dangerous, malicious mole all along....

and...

Microsoft decided to just send a mole to take over Nokia’s business, abolish Linux there (Nokia had become one of the top Linux contributors), remove any chances of Android adoption there, then feed trolls to attack Android and sue Android directly.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Elop’s “family still lives in the Seattle area” (how telling).

There's plenty more where that came from in the TechRights article..

Referenced within the TechRights article is a link to this article that gets into the real nitty-gritty of the allegation.

The Full Story of Nokia and Microsoft - How we got here, and why Microsoft will fail with Nokia handsets just like it did with Kin


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY by member 'caffeine-overclock' over at Reddit:

Elop killed Nokia twice: First by announcing the move to Windows Phone 9 months before they could deliver, and again by announcing that no more MeeGo phones would be produced the day after the first MeeGo phone was released to extremely positive reviews.

Microsoft's phone ambitions are similarly doomed because buying Skype caused most if not all of the global carriers to despise Microsoft, and by association Nokia. This will only get worse as time goes on, since Microsoft/Nokia just became Microsoft and any residual good will from Nokia is gone. Without carrier support, Microsoft can't succeed in those markets.

Definitely worth the read if you have time.

This is gonna be a fun one. Grab a seat.




-----------------------------------------------------------------
ADDENDUM:

Per mouser's request: relevant links in this thread:

Stephen Elop's bio on Wikipedia

TechRights: Microsoft’s Patent Attack on Linux/Android Advances to Next Stage With New Nokia Acquisition, Patent Setup - by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The Full Story of Nokia and Microsoft - How we got here, and why Microsoft will fail with Nokia handsets just like it did with Kin

Note: I can't promise I can stay up on this - but I'll try.

142

General Software Discussion / Facebook gently reminds its users that they are not Facebook's customers

« on: September 14, 2013, 07:10 AM »

It's yet another example of how a benign and popular app created by a third-party developer can be removed without recourse from the emerging walled-garden computing spaces we're allowing ourselves to be led into.

Why did Facebook remove the app? Mostly because it could. Possibly for the unforgivable crime of allowing a Facebook member to somewhat customize how Facebook displays on their own computer.

This from the FOSSforce website:

Facebook Permanately Deletes Social Fixer’s Page
Christine Hall

More bad news for Matt Kruse, the developer of the popular Social Fixer plugin that gives users some control on how their Facebook displays on their computer, as well as giving them some special features.

I told you on September 3rd that the plugin’s Facebook page had been removed without warning. At that time, Mr. Kruse was in the process of “appealing” Facebook’s decision–if that’s the proper word. While the social site did offer-up a button to click to request that Facebook reconsider their opinion, that was it. No text box to plead one’s case was offered.

As of yesterday, the page has been completely removed for violating “community standards.”

The Social Fixer destination on Facebook was quite popular. According to Mr. Kruse, the page had over 338,000 “likes.” In addition, Social Fixer has a Facebook Support Group with over 13,000 members, where users can get help with technical issues. A Social Fixer Facebook news page has 1.47 million followers.

In early September when the page was first removed, supposedly for “spamming,” Mr Kruse seemed confident the issue would be resolved and the page would eventually again be operational. As of yesterday, however, the page has completely disappeared. Visitors who attempt to visit the site are greeted with the notice: “Sorry, this page isn’t available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”

On the Social Fixer website, Mr. Kruse writes that he doesn’t know why Facebook removed his page. He’s certain of one thing, however, it’s not because he’s a spammer...

<more>

What makes the story even more interesting is that not only was the Social Fixer app (along with its webpage) removed, but the app creator's login (along with his wife's!) was also blocked.

That wasn’t the only action taken by Facebook when they permanently removed the page yesterday:

    “Not only did they remove the page, but they also blocked my personal account from posting anything for 12 hours (I can’t even Like anything). They also did the same for anyone who was an Administrator or Moderator of the Page – including my wife’s personal account! Members of the support team, who generously volunteer their time to help users, have been shut out as well. They did one big sweep, I guess.”

Shutdown, removed from a catalog with no explanation or opportunity for any real appeal process, blocked from replying or even communicating - such is the brave new world of online services - and the environment in which the service users and software developers are finding themselves increasingly in.

It's been said many  times before, but it's still worth repeating: If you're not the company's customer - you're the company's product.
 

143

Non-Windows Software / LINUX: Intel reverses position on Ubuntu. XMir removed from main video driver

« on: September 10, 2013, 05:34 AM »

Seems like there's more trouble in Paradise for Ubuntu's Mir Display Server plans.

Intel has announced it will not be incorporating Ubuntu's XMir patches into their video driver code.

Apparently Ubuntu's recent and controversial tendency to go its own separate way - even if it meant reinventing the wheel at times - is starting to come home to roost.

From Distrowatch:

One of the features Ubuntu has been working on for the past several months is Mir, an alternative display server Canonical hopes to run on all Ubuntu-powered devices, from desktop computers to mobile phones. One of the many challenges facing Mir is the availability of video drivers and the Mir team received some bad news on that front this week. Intel has stated that, at this time, they do not plan to support XMir patches in their driver code. A recent patch to the Intel driver comes with the comment, "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream." Intel video cards may still work with XMir, though it will mean Intel driver support will have to be maintained by Canonical as their patches will not be applied upstream.

From Phoronix:

Intel Reverts Plans, Will Not Support Ubuntu's XMir
Posted by Michael Larabel on September 07, 2013

In an interesting change of events, the mainline Intel Linux graphics driver has reverted the patch to support XMir -- the X11 compatibility layer for the Mir Display Server in Ubuntu Linux.

This week there was the surprise of the Intel 3.0 Linux DDX driver coming and with it SNA acceleration is enabled by default and it also integrated support for XMir. There's small work needed to the DDX X.Org graphics drivers to be able to support running XMir, similar to XWayland for Wayland users. The support was merged as Canonical said the XMir API should be stable.

However, this morning the XMir work was reverted. In releasing a new 3.0 xf86-video-intel driver snapshot, Intel's Chris Wilson wrote in a Git commit:

   We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream.

    -The Management


Intel, which is a company heavily invested in Wayland and has many full-time employees working on the competing display server (including Kristian Høgsberg, the Wayland founder), now doesn't want any XMir support in their mainline driver. It's interesting to see Intel management force the XMir removal from the Intel driver just days after it was committed and to publicly state a neutral stance on Canonical's controversial display server.

Canonical will now need to carry the XMir support out-of-tree from the xf86-video-intel driver. Canonical is also carrying patched versions of Mesa, xf86-video-ati, and xf86-video-nouveau for being able to support Mir/XMir in Ubuntu 13.10. The binary AMD and NVIDIA graphics drivers also remain incompatible with Mir.

 

144

Living Room / Practice makes perfect - swat team tactics used to check water quality

« on: September 06, 2013, 01:28 PM »

You just can't make these stories up folks!

From Techdirt (who else?)

Regulatory Agencies Sending Armed Squads To Check Water Quality, 'Rescue' Baby Deer
from the when-all-you-have-is-a-bunch-of-armed-officers... dept

It seems as if nearly every police department, no matter how small or unthreatened by criminal activity, wants to outfit their officers with military-grade equipment (something the DHS is only to happy to help with -- provided someone invokes the codeword "terrorism" at some point during the requisition). The outcome is inevitable, tragic and more than a little ridiculous. Local SWAT teams are now rolling up on suburban lawns like they're storming Normandy, executing no-knock warrants in the dead of night to unverified addresses. Some occasions result in little more than completely freaked-out citizens. Others end in death and injury. Sometimes it's just the family dog that takes a bullet. Other times, it's innocent civilians.

But this militarization goes even further than various police departments. It also permeates other government agencies, agencies that really shouldn't be utilizing heavily-armed SWAT teams to enforce regulatory policies. It's not as if anyone should be expecting the kind of resistance these teams are armed for -- at least not in these situations.

This is the bold new face of American enforcement -- squads of armed men sent on a life-or-death mission to… check water quality...

<more>

Give a baby a hammer - and it soon discovers everything is a nail.

Give a young cop a ninja suit and an assault rifle and everything soon turns into an outtake from a Die Hard movie.

Seriously...

Just what are they really practicing all these storm trooper tactics for?
 

145

Non-Windows Software / LINUX: Remmina - superb remote access client

« on: August 30, 2013, 01:27 PM »

Remmina! My current favorite multiprotocol remote desktop client, regardless of platform. Especially useful if you're primarily a Linux user that needs a reliable desktop client for accessing remote Windows servers. IMHO, Remmina works even better in that capacity than Microsoft's own RDP client.

Homepage here.

About the Remmina Project

Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK+, aiming to be useful for system administrators and travellers, who need to work with lots of remote computers in front of either large monitors or tiny netbooks. Remmina supports multiple network protocols in an integrated and consistent user interface. Currently RDP, VNC, NX, XDMCP and SSH are supported.

Remmina is released in separated source packages:

    

• "remmina", the main GTK+ application
• "remmina-plugins", a set of plugins

Remmina is free and open-source software, released under GNU GPL license.

Some screenshots:

           

 

146

Living Room / UbuntuEdge on Indiegogo = FAIL

« on: August 26, 2013, 10:04 AM »

It's official:



Here's Ubuntu's farewell message. Makes me wonder of this wasn't really just a ploy to do some market research, "test the waters," generate some press buzz, and mobilize some unpaid evangelists (ala Apple) with that ridiculous $32 million target they set. I'm half convinced Shuttleworth really didn't want it to fly - and priced the campaign accordingly. Especially since they're using this campaign to bolster their position with certain hardware manufacturers to build Ubuntu-based phones. Also interesting is their comment about how they'll be personally contacting their "biggest referrers" in the upcoming weeks. Sweetheart deals, or job offers, anyone?

Canonical posted an announcement 4 days ago

Hi everyone

So ends a crazy month. We’ve broken records, we’ve been written and talked about across the world, we’ve worn out our F5 keys, and we’ve learned a lot of invaluable lessons about crowdfunding. Our bold campaign to build a visionary new device ultimately fell short, but we can take away so many positives.

We raised $12,809,906, making the Edge the world’s biggest ever fixed crowdfunding campaign. Let’s not lose sight of what an achievement that is. Close to 20,000 people believed in our vision enough to contribute hundreds of dollars for a phone months in advance, just to help make it happen. It wasn’t just individuals, either: Bloomberg LP gave $80,000 and several smaller businesses contributed $7,000 each. Thank you all for getting behind us.

Then there’s the Ubuntu community. Many of you gave your time as well as money, organising your own mailing lists, social media strategies and online ads, and successfully reaching out to your local media. We even saw entire sites created to gather information and help promote the Edge. We’ll be contacting our biggest referrers personally.

Most importantly, the big winner from this campaign is Ubuntu. While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014. Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won’t have much longer to wait.

All of the support and publicity has continued to drive our discussions with some major manufacturers, and we have many of the world’s biggest mobile networks already signed up to the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group. They’ll have been watching this global discussion of Ubuntu and the need for innovation very closely indeed. Watch this space!

As for crowdfunding, we believe it’s a great way to give consumers a voice and to push for more innovation and transparency in the mobile industry. And who knows, perhaps one day we’ll take everything we’ve learned from this campaign -- achievements and mistakes -- and try it all over again.

Thank you all

Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu Edge team and everyone at Canonical

P.S. We’ve been assured by Paypal that all refunds will be processed within five working days.

It's all just a little too neat...

147

Living Room / Read all the officially and legally released NSA documents

« on: August 25, 2013, 12:11 PM »

Lawfare has collected all their commentary and links to the actual released NSA documents on one convenient page.

The NSA Documents: The Entire Series

By Benjamin Wittes
Sunday, August 25, 2013 at 11:07 AM

Our series on the NSA documents now being complete, I thought I would collect all of the posts together in one place. Here are the documents themselves. And here are our seven posts commenting on them:

    The Introduction
    Summary of the October 2011 FISC Opinion
    Summary of the November 2011 FISC Opinion
    Summary of the September 2012 FISC Opinion
    Summary of Statements to Congress
    Summary of the Minimization Procedures
    Summary of the Semi-Annual Compliance Report

Now that the series is done, I will turn to the question of what we should make of this material.

Go here to access the page with the links.

I'm working my way through the docs and Lawfare commentaries. Interesting reading.

148

Living Room / Groklaw shutting down because of our new US survelliance state

« on: August 20, 2013, 11:58 AM »

This is probably the most disturbing bit of news to date. Groklaw, long-time champion of online freedoms and laws which respect liberty and The Constitution is saying it can't continue under the present state of affairs. Pamela Jones issued this statement today.

It's been covered by several prominent websites such as Popehat

Faced With The Security State, Groklaw Opts Out
Aug 20, 2013
By Ken White.
Politics & Current Events   

For ten years Pamela Jones has run Groklaw, a site collecting, discussing, and explaining legal developments of interest to the open-source software community. Her efforts have, justifiably, won many awards.

She's done now.

Running a blog long-term can be exhausting, irritating, and sometimes discouraging. Creative efforts have arcs, with a beginning and an end. If Jones were closing up shop because she's had enough and has accomplished what she set out to do, I would be sorry to see her go, but it would be the kind of sorry you feel when you finish a good book.

That's not why she's stopping.

Pamela Jones is ending Groklaw because she can't trust her government. She's ending it because, in the post-9/11 era, there's no viable and reliable way to assure that our email won't be read by the state — because she can't confidently communicate privately with her readers and tipsters and subjects and friends and family.

    "I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel.

    So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate."

In making this choice, Jones echoes the words of Lavar Levison, who shut down his encrypted email service Lavabit. Levison said he was doing so rather than "become complicit in crimes against the American people"

<more>

and Techdirt.

More NSA Spying Fallout: Groklaw Shutting Down
from the the-pain-of-being-watched dept


A few months ago, after the NSA spying stories first broke, we wrote about a bit from This American Life where the host, Ira Glass, was interviewing lawyers for prisoners detained at Guantanamo, about the impact of knowing that the government was listening in on every single phone call you made. The responses were chilling. The people talked about how it stopped them from being emotional with their children or other close friends and relatives. How they had trouble functioning in ways that many people take for granted, just because the mental stress of knowing that you have absolutely no privacy is incredibly burdensome. PJ, the dynamo behind Groklaw, has written a powerful piece explaining the similar feeling she's getting from all the revelations about government surveillance, in particularly the shutting down of Lavabit by Ladar Levison, and his suggestion that if people knew what he knew about email, they wouldn't use it.

Because of this, she's shutting down Groklaw.

You really need to read the entire piece, but it clearly lays out the sort of mental anguish that you get with the realization that what you thought was private and personal, might not be any more. She compares it to the feeling of having her apartment robbed, and the creepy feeling you get that some stranger was riffing through all of your personal belongings. And, from there, she riffs on the importance of privacy and intimacy, and how the totalitarian state takes those things away, quoting a powerful passage from Janna Malamud Smith's book Private Matters. You should go read the full quotes, but it notes the psychological impact of not having privacy.

And that's how PJ feels right now. The fact that the NSA is collecting all emails in or out of the US, as well as all encrypted messages, means that it's impossible to have that privacy and intimacy that she feels is necessary to run the site:

    "There is now no shield from forced exposure. Nothing in that parenthetical thought list is terrorism-related, but no one can feel protected enough from forced exposure any more to say anything the least bit like that to anyone in an email, particularly from the US out or to the US in, but really anywhere. You don't expect a stranger to read your private communications to a friend. And once you know they can, what is there to say? Constricted and distracted. That's it exactly. That's how I feel.

    So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.

    I'm really sorry that it's so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint."

<more>

This is indeed a day of national mourning.

149

Living Room / Ridiculous complaint argues free software is a form of predatory pricing

« on: August 15, 2013, 12:45 PM »

From the "You Just Can't Make This Up" Department comes this story posted over at OSNews:

Microsoft and Nokia protest "price predation" and play at being prey.

Does no-cost software harm consumers? The FairSearch coalition thinks so, at least when it comes to Google: They say Google engages in predatory pricing when it distributes Android – a Linux-based mobile operating system – without charge. Recently, FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) responded in a letter to the European Commission, labeling as "wrong" and "dangerous" FairSearch’s claims, and saying further:

    The predatory pricing theory proposed by FairSearch is plainly unsuitable to describe a market where there is no price, and a product that, being Free Software, can literally be taken by anybody and "forked" ... . There is no "below cost" distribution in Free Software, because the price which market participants set ... in these circumstances is precisely zero.

Groklaw has a good write-up on FSFE’s efforts.

What is the FairSearch coalition? Its complaint against Google describes FairSearch as "an international coalition of 17 specialized search and technology companies." Those companies include Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle, which say they have joined forces to protect competition, transparency and innovation to benefit consumers.

Google has a different take:

    FairSearch claims to represent consumers’ best interests, but it consists of companies who either compete directly with Google or don’t like where their websites appear in Google’s search results. No consumers or consumer groups are members of FairSearch.

The Verge states a similar view:

    Beneath the sheen of do-gooder ideology, FairSearch can be most charitably described as a Google watchdog. It seeks to fan the flames of disapproval where they’ve started organically, originate them where they haven’t, and generally disseminate negativity toward the Google brand. Think of it as a PR firm working to destroy rather than create goodwill.

These anti-FOSS price predation claims might bring to mind another case: Remember Daniel Wallace? He sued Red Hat, IBM, and Novell, claiming the companies conspired via the GPL to hold Linux’s price at zero. Mr. Wallace’s suit was summarily dismissed...

<more>

Shades of recent history where certain telcos filed lawsuits to prohibit municipalities from providing their own low-cost broadband services to citizens because it would represent "unfair competition" on the part of the government - even though these same telcos declined to provide service to these communities, citing "prohibitive costs" as the reason for their refusal.

Ah Doublethink...close cousin of legalese - it's a wonderful thing!

150

Living Room / New software obfuscation method - possible end to need for SW patents?

« on: August 03, 2013, 03:58 PM »

Here's an interesting announcement from UCLA.

Seems a researcher has developed a new complex software obfuscation method that goes beyond the way it's been done previously. Supposedly, this new methodology allows obscured code to be run just as easily as native code, but still remains extremely difficult or impossible to reverse engineer or analyse.

Computer scientists develop 'mathematical jigsaw puzzles' to encrypt software
Software remains completely functional but impervious to reverse-engineering
By Matthew Chin July 29, 2013

UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahai and a team of researchers have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it. This is known in computer science as "software obfuscation," and it is the first time it has been accomplished.
 
Sahai, who specializes in cryptography at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, collaborated with Sanjam Garg, who recently earned his doctorate at UCLA and is now at IBM Research; Craig Gentry, Shai Halevi and Mariana Raykova of IBM Research; and Brent Waters, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Garg worked with Sahai as a student when the research was done.  
 
Their peer-reviewed paper will be formally presented in October at the 54th annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, one of the two most prominent conferences in the field of theoretical computer science. Sahai has also presented this research in recent invited talks at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
"The real challenge and the great mystery in the field was: Can you actually take a piece of software and encrypt it but still have it be runnable, executable and fully functional," Sahai said. "It's a question that a lot of companies have been interested in for a long time."  
 
According to Sahai, previously developed techniques for obfuscation presented only a "speed bump," forcing an attacker to spend some effort, perhaps a few days, trying to reverse-engineer the software. The new system, he said, puts up an "iron wall," making it impossible for an adversary to reverse-engineer the software without solving mathematical problems that take hundreds of years to work out on today's computers — a game-change in the field of cryptography.
 
The researchers said their mathematical obfuscation mechanism can be used to protect intellectual property by preventing the theft of new algorithms and by hiding the vulnerability a software patch is designed to repair when the patch is distributed.
 
"You write your software in a nice, reasonable, human-understandable way and then feed that software to our system," Sahai said. "It will output this mathematically transformed piece of software that would be equivalent in functionality, but when you look at it, you would have no idea what it's doing."
 
The key to this successful obfuscation mechanism is a new type of "multilinear jigsaw puzzle." Through this mechanism, attempts to find out why and how the software works will be thwarted with only a nonsensical jumble of numbers. <more>

I can't help but wonder if something like this could provide a strong argument for no longer granting patents on software? The expression of an idea (as opposed to the idea itself) is the only thing that is eligible for protection under a US patent. Might the fact you could completely mask and protect the expression of an idea (i.e the underlying code and functional design) be the proverbial "cheap technical fix" that finally eliminates the supposed justification to allow patenting computer code? Hard to say somebody stole your code when there's no way they could have seen it to begin with. All code becomes a "trade secret" in this scenario should this new methodology actually do what it claims it can.



I'm sure the trolls won't be happy about this. Because this could be the game changer if their lawyers finally do get removed from the game.



Hope springs eternal...