Linux Solutions

Alongside a group of human rights and public interest organisations, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to introduce a global code of conduct that they say will offer better protection for online freedom of speech and privacy against government intrusion.

The Global Network Initiative (GNI) commits the companies to “avoid or minimise the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression,” according to the final draft of documents that the New York Times have obtained.

The document states that privacy is not only a human right, but a “guarantor of human dignity”. The initiative aims to commit the companies to try and resist demands for restricting freedom of speech and overly broad demands that could compromise the privacy of their users.

The initiative was set up after human rights groups and Congress criticised the companies for cooperating with the Chinese government’s censorship laws for its citizens. As well as setting out a code of conduct, the initiative will act as a non-governmental forum for companies and human rights groups to join together in the fight against censorship. The GNI will also establish a system of independent authors to rate the companies’ conduct.

Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First, said, “This is an important first step in providing standards for free expression and privacy that obligate companies to do more to challenge government restrictions.”

“It sets up an accountability mechanism that will allow each of the companies to be evaluated over time.”

As well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - Vodafone and France Telecom are also considering getting involved, with more companies expected to be involved in the near future.

The GNI has the backing of many large scale human rights organisations including; Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, and The Committee to Protect Journalists. Also involved are the Business for Social Responsibility and the Center for Democracy and technology, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the Calvert Group.

Although things are moving along, its not enough for some human rights activists. Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organisation for Human Rights USA feels that “after two years of effort, they have ended up with so little.”

He feels that, “It is really very little more than a broad statement of support for a general principle without any concrete backup mechanism to ensure that the guidelines will be followed.”

Currently Google, Yahoo China, and Microsoft MSN search are all cooperating with the Chinese government to filter search results, and more recently the Chinese version of Skype had been modified to save users conversations on to servers run buy Tom, Skype’s Chinese partner.

Microsoft yesterday played down the dispute between them and the British Education Technology Agency over the software giant’s attempts at getting Office 2007 in to British classrooms.

In May Becta confirmed it had referred an interoperability complaint to the European Commission, claiming that Microsoft’s latest office suite contained too many restrictions to work fully with other document formats.

The group had previously accused MS of unfair licensing practices in the schools software market and made a formal complaint to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in autumn last year. Microsoft has now announced a new Open Licensing Programme (OLP) for government that will launch at the start of next month, which should help appease the education body.

The company said the OLP offered “a new way for public sector organisations to purchase software from Microsoft resellers” who will sell MS products at a discounted rate.

Its all fair and well slashing the price, but what about the document compatibility issues?

Microsoft’s Michel Van der Bel gave Becta this statement:

“We understand that the issue of interoperability was one of the key factors underpinning Becta’s October 2007 complaint to the OFT. I look forward to continuing to work collaboratively with Becta to ensure that in implementing built-in support for ODF in Microsoft Office 2007 we meet the needs of the education sector.”

Becta responded, saying that they were pleased with Microsoft’s “clear commitment to effective interoperability and to the introduction of a pilot licensing programme”.

“Microsoft’s recent announcement of built-in support for ODF in Office 2007, and the very positive discussions we have had with them about their commitment to effective implementation,” said Becta’s Stephen Crowne.

“This will give schools and colleges additional flexibility to use a wider range of software. We will continue to work closely with Microsoft and the wider industry to maximise the benefit of ICT to our education institutions.”

Open Source Consortium founder Mark Taylor warned that education bodies should stop and think before being “fooled” by Microsoft’s new licensing program.

“Our view is that Microsoft has been forced to this position, and that the term ‘clear commitment’ should be read ‘dragged kicking and screaming’,” he said. “If not for the stance of Neelie Kroes and the European Commission, if not for the OOXML roadshow and the ISO controversy, if not for Becta’s OFT complaint, does anyone believe this would happen?

“Schools can now choose between long-term software freedom or a short-term discount on the next lock-in play.”

Software developer Red Hat has bought an Israeli company in an effort to gain a foothold in the battle against Microsoft and smaller rivals that provide computing services for complex networks.

Red Hat said on Thursday that it paid US$107 million in cash for privately held Qumranet, which sells software that helps computer systems run multiple programs more efficiently with less equipment.

The acquisition is the latest in Red hats long running war with Microsoft. Red hat represents the largest seller of Linux operating systems in the world.

Qumranet’s software will enable Red Hat to piggyback its products onto Microsoft Windows applications, giving Red Hat access to Microsoft’s customer base, said Katrinka McCallum, Red Hat’s vice president of management services.

Analysts however warned that Red Hat, who paid a premium for the Israeli company, has had limited success in the past in breaking into the emerging software area that Qumranet has been developing.

The acquisition will cut Red Hat’s earnings by 5 cents to 6 cents a share in 2009 before the company realises any financial benefits.

Red Hat’s stock fell 51 cents, or 2.5 percent, Thursday to $19.93.

Red Hat acquired multitasking software programs that are referred to as “virtualisation,” a relatively new technology field that represented less than $100 million in sales last year but could balloon to $2.4 billion in 2011, according to a recent Goldman Sachs analysis.

Microsoft dived into the virtualisation field only this year. The market is currently controlled by VMWare of California, but the field is so young that an estimated 95 percent of potential customers remain untapped.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has started a month long celebration of the GNU Projects 25th anniversary with a video in which British comic legend Stephen Fry expresses his support for the free software.

The insanely intelligent Fry shared his love of the GNU Project and Linux in a blog posting last February.

“The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU Project and Linux,” Fry wrote. “I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.”

The blog entry caught the eye of Matt Lee, a campaigns manager for the FSF, who contacted Fry and arranged the recoding of the video last spring in London.

Check out the video below:
Happy Birthday GNU
According to FSF director Peter Brown the release of the Fry video, is just one of the things planned for the anniversary of the GNU project. “We’re planning a month long celebration,” says Brown, “starting with this video and running through Software Freedom Day [September 20] to the anniversary itself, which is September 27.”

At least one campaign and an essay by Richard Stallman are also planned.

FSF has several goals, according to Brown. The first “is to make people realize just how expansive the scope of GNU is, how much GNU [software] there is out there,” says Brown. “I think a lot of people would be surprised at the amount of new GNU stuff that is coming all the time.”

Brown says the anniversary is a good time to re-emphasize the ultimate goal of the movement.

“If we end up in a world where some free software applications are very, very popular and we don’t end up with software freedom that will be to the detriment of everyone. So this is our way to remind the community that there’s a goal in mind, an end point that’s more than having your software work well on the Microsoft platform,” Brown says.

“It’s about having a complete environment of free software that we want everyone to use. We want to push that final goal of replacing all proprietary software.”

In this sense, Brown says, the anniversary is not just about GNU itself. “It’s not just that we want our particular project to be successful and popular. Promoting GNU is great, but we have to realize that’s only one part of the puzzle. It’s only by getting there jointly that we will succeed.”

News has recently broken of internet search giant Google’s intentions to release an open source browser called Google Chrome, which thy promise will be small, fast and stable.

It should be available to download shortly, but you can get an indication of what’s in store from a 38-page comic by Scott McCloud. The comic starts by explaining how browsers have changed: how they run web applications rather than just showing pages.

Tabs appear to be central to Chrome, and should be movable from window to window. The browser will be multi-threaded, so separate tabs can run separate processes.

The URL window will include and auto complete function – but just to pages you’ve previously typed in the address bar. Opening a new window will show you the nine pages you visit the most and four sites you search on most often rather than a home page.

For people who enjoy the dark side of the internet, Chrome will have an incognito porn mode – where none of your browsing history is recoded and cookies are deleted when the window is shut.

In an effort to fight malware, any dangerous processes are sandboxed – they cannot write files to your hard drive or read your documents. Chrome will get automatic updates of phishing sites and malware attacks so your browsers will get a warning if they go to a flagged site.

Chrome also uses a built in task manager for each tab so you can see what resources are being used by individual pages.

The Chrome development team thanks Mozilla and Web Kit for their contribution.

The Windows version launches in 100 countries today, and Mac and Linux versions will arrive shortly.

OpenHanded, the “Poky Linux” and Matchbox developer has announced that it has been acquired by Intel Corp. The UK-based embedded Linux services team joins the Intel Open Source Technology Center, and will focus its efforts on Moblin Development for mobile internet devices, as well as other mobile handsets.

According to Openhanded, Intel will continue to support open source projects led by OpenHanded staff, including Clutter and Matchbox, “and in most cases, will accelerate these projects as they become an integral part of Moblin.” OpenHanded contributions will now be available from the Intel open source site.

Openhanded still has the rights to Matchbox, a lightweight window manager for X11 that is widely used in Linux devices. Nokia, for example, uses Matchbox in the Maemo stack it maintains for its Linux-based N810, N800 and 770 web tablets.

OpenHanded also maintains the free GNOME-based Poky Linux 3.0 distro for mobile devices. Similar to Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, and the Nokia-sponsored Maemo.org project, the release is based on X11, GTK+, and Matchbox. However, in place of the Hildon GUI layer used by these platforms, Poky includes a new “Sato 0.1″ application framework and theme.

OpenHanded was founded by Matthew Allum, a well known X.org and Debian hacker, OpenedHand joined GNOME’s advisory board in 2005, and has long worked to improve GNOME for embedded applications.

The Moblin project was launched by Intel early last summer. The project maintains a multi-tiered chroot-based sandbox aimed at helping to standardise development tool-chains used to build software for Intel’s Atom processors. At its lowest chroot level, the sandbox can be used to build a Linux-based application environment resembling Poky Linux.

Hackers love spying on and intercepting commutation between two computers, but now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University hope the software they have created will help thwart criminals.

The free software can be downloaded for use with the increasingly popular Mozilla Firefox browser, and creates a new way for people to verify whether the site they are entering is authentic.

Most browsers already alert users to a dodgy site. The most common way is for the browser to let us know that the site has not been verified by VeriSign or GoDaddy.com. Those are two companies who sell Secure Sockets Layer certificates, which are what the little padlock in the bottom right of a toolbar.

The problem Carnegie Mellon researchers say is that many people are confused about what to do when they get warnings about a bad certificate.

Some users click through, heading happily on to malicious suites that steal personal information, while others just head somewhere else.

Researchers - David Andersen, Adrian Perrig and Dan Wendlandt - created a program that performs a simple extra step. It can tap into a network of publicly accessible servers that have been programmed to ping Web sites and record changes in the encryption keys they use to secure data.

Any discrepancy can be a sign that hackers are rerouting traffic through machines under their control, a pernicious type of attack known as a “man in the middle.”

As a result, the new program either overrides the security warning if a site is deemed legitimate, or throws up another warning if the subsequent probes reveal more red flags

Microsoft’s Open XML (Extensible Markup Language) format has leapt over its final hurdle, and is now moving forward as an official ISO standard. The file format had been held back earlier this year by claims that the voting process was rushed and that Microsoft’s specification information was incomplete.

Open XML has finally been given approval after appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela failed to gain enough support from the other national standards bodies. Microsoft’s file format will now also be known as ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats.

Complaints about the Open XML format has been going on ever since Microsoft submitted its first standard proposal. Concerns escalated after it was given fast track approval in March 2007.

At that time, the countries who were opposed to Open XML as a standard raised concerns over how the file format works, patent violations, and the overlap with Open Document Format (ODF), which is an alternate Office-compatible file format that had already been approved as an ISO standard.

Open XML’s approval is a significant victory for Microsoft because it allows the company to market its Office software suite to government agencies that require open file formats. The ISO will publish the DIS 29500 standard in the coming weeks.

A company that ensures the Linux community is safe from intellectual property litigation by buying up patents, will soon launch a website to help inventors file defensive publications – that’s documents that make details of an invention public, thus preventing others from later making patent claims on it..

“The more we can mobilize this community, the fewer patents that will actually be granted,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN). “Whatever happens in the patent reform world in the next [U.S.] administration is great, but we have to act now to stop the granting of patents that threaten Linux and open-source in general.”

OIN will reveal more details about the site over the coming weeks. Bergelt described it as “a production environment where we educate and train people to do this. We’ll work with them to make sure it’s put in a form that is acceptable.”

With backing from Google, Sony, Novell, IBM, Philips, Red Hat, NEC, Alfresco and Oracle among the licensees, the effort will serve as a counterpart to OIN’s existing strategy, where it provides royalty free patents to companies in exchange for a commitment that they won’t assert their patents against the Linux system.

OIN generally acquires patents tied to areas like virtualisation and networking. “Those are kind of the key areas to Linux as it moves forward,” Bergelt said.

He did not reveal quite how much money OIN has on hand but said that it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that the organisation will “continue to buy at a brisk pace.”

One small town in the US has started an anti-Windows revolution that comes hot off the heels of Independence Day: the cunningly titled, “Lindependece Day”.

On July 28th “a significant percentage” of the town of Felton, Calif, declared independence form Microsoft’s strangle hold on the world, and are going Redmond-free “for one week…maybe an entire month.” But, its organisers say, “If things go right, we can start talking about forever.”

It’s quite outstanding that the world’s media didn’t pick this up. Lindependence Day was preceded by three weeks of “installfests” to give Felton residents a chance to look at the other options provided by Linux-based systems. LiveCDs and bootable thumb drives – “dual booting for the more daring residents” – were among the technologies covered.

Representatives from distros and FOSS (free open source software) programs were there to answer questions and give tutorials on how to use the software, with support from Mandriva, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, AntiX, Wolvix, OpenOffice.org and CodeWeavers.

No word yet on how many of Felton’s 6,000 or so residents participated, but “I expect that most of the people who participate in this project will continue to stay ‘proprietary free’ after the week is over, because they will discover what we already know: Linux, FOSS and the freedom to choose in our digital pursuits far outweigh the digital hegemony provided by the digital mandarins in Redmond and Cupertino,” wrote Larry Cafiero of HeliOS Solutions West, one of the project’s organizers, on the Ubuntu Forums.

Briliantly the trend seems to be spreading, with reports that similar initiatives are coming in Boulder Creek, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Taos, N.M.; and even Italy, where 100 towns will participate, according to a Lindependence blog.

“The Lindependence events are a good thing since they help overcome one of Microsoft’s biggest advantages: inertia,” Gerhard Mack, a Montreal-based consultant and Slashdot blogger, said

“If not for the event, people would just continue using Microsoft products because that’s what they have always been using, and they would be afraid to try something new on their own,” Mack said