Can chip companies profit off the maker movement? TI is betting on it

Close Windows, Open Doors

Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented, Dismisses Uniloc Claim Against Rackspace

You cannot put chains on an idea
Via TechCrunch

A federal judge has thrown out a patent claim against Rackspace, ruling that mathematical algorithms can’t be patented. The ruling in the Eastern Disrict stemmed from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA asserting that processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation.

Chief Judge Leonard Davis based the ruling on U.S. Supreme Court case law that prohibits the patenting of mathematical algorithms. According to Rackspace, this is the first reported instance in which the Eastern District of Texas has granted an early motion to dismiss finding a patent invalid because it claimed unpatentable subject matter.

Red Hat, which supplies Linux to Rackspace, provided Rackspace’s defense. Red Hat has a policy of standing behind customers through its Open Source Assurance program.

Rob Tiller, Red Hat’s Assistant General Counsel for IP, said:

“NPE patent lawsuits are a chronic and serious problem for the technology industry. Such lawsuits, which are frequently based on patents that should never have been granted, typically cost millions of dollars to defend. These suits are a plague on innovation, economic growth, and job creation. Courts can help address this problem by determining the validity of patents early and with appropriate care. In this case, Judge Davis did just that, and set a great example for future cases.”

Patent cases have become notorious exploitations of an antiquated patent system. The Red Hat dismissal is a rare one and a validation of the court’s distinction about algorithms in patent disputes.

Uniloc has not responded to a request for comment about the ruling.

Floating Point Number Addition Algorithm

Richard Stallman Endorsing NYC City Council Who's Proposing Tax Credit For Developing Free Software

Richard Stallman's personal site.

http://stallman.org

For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.

I am pleased to endorse Benjamin Kallos for New York City Council. My main reason is that he has proposed a tax credit for developing free software. That policy can help advance free software.

This isn't a one-off. Kallos has a record of pushing government to enter the Internet age in the right way, the way that respects people's freedom and increases the public's control over government.

There are many other important political issues, and I like most of Kallos's positions. They are designed to help New Yorkers in general. I did find one major issue of disagreement: he gives support to Israel's defense without denouncing the occupation of Palestine. However, since the New York City Council has no authority over US foreign policy, I can overlook that disagreement in this race.

Endorsing a candidate involves comparing that candidate with the others. Kallos's opponents don't impress me, and in particular they show no commitment to freedom in technology.

Copyright (c) 2013 Richard Stallman Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.

Why DVD's Are Illegal To Watch On Linux And The Story Of Hacking The Content Scrambling System

Via How-To-Geek

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes unlocking cell phones, ripping DVDs, removing eBook DRM, and jailbreaking tablets illegal in the USA. However, there’s another surprise: simply watching a DVD on Linux is also illegal.

This is why Ubuntu and other Linux distributions don’t include out-of-the-box DVD support, forcing you to run a command that downloads and installs libdvdcss from elsewhere – not the Linux distribution’s software repositories, or they would get in trouble.

If you are an American who’s watched a DVD on Linux, there’s a good chance the DMCA makes you a criminal.

What the DMCA Says

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act came into effect in 1998 in the USA. It’s a copyright law that includes anti-circumvention measures. Essentially, it makes it illegal to circumvent “technological protection measures,” including cell phone locks and protections against installing unapproved software on tablets like Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface RT (jailbreaking).

Technological protection measures are also found on eBooks, so breaking the DRM on an eBook to read it on another eReader is technically a crime, as well. (Not all eBooks have to contain DRM, however. Our eBook has no DRM, although it’s published through Amazon.)

You can find more information about the DMCA and its anti-circumvention measures on the Chilling Effects website.

Video DVDs are Encrypted

Playing a commercial video DVD is normally as simple as placing it in a DVD player or a computer’s DVD drive. If it’s a computer, the appropriate software starts up and starts playing it automatically. In an age of DRM-tainted eBooks and other types of files that may not play on all your hardware, DVDs are a convenient way to watch movies without any restrictions.

That’s what it feels like, at least. However, most commercial video DVDs are encrypted using the Content Scramble System (CSS). If you wanted to produce your own DVD player, you’d have to license CSS support from the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA). As part of this licensing scheme, you would also have to implement other copy-protection features, such as the region code system that prevents DVDs purchased in one part of the world from being played on DVD players purchased elsewhere.

DeCSS

In 1999, there was no way to play DVDs on the Linux operating system. While DVD players built into computers came with licensed DVD-playing software for Windows, they didn’t function on Linux. A Norwegian programmer named Jon Lech Johansen created DeCSS by reverse-engineering a poorly-protected DVD player. DeCSS was capable of decoding the CSS encryption, allowing unlicensed software to access the data on a DVD video disc. Before DeCSS, Linux users had no ability to watch video DVDs on Linux.

In response, his home was raided by Norwegian police in 2000 and the DVD CCA attempted to prosecute him under the Norwegian criminal code. He was ultimately acquitted, but the court process took several years.

libdvdcss

Modern Linux machines don’t use DeCSS. However, through examining the DeCSS code, people realized that CSS was vulnerable to a brute-force attack. CSS uses 40-bit encryption and doesn’t use every possible key, so it’s an extremely weak type of encryption. A modern computer can crack a DVD’s CSS encryption through brute force – that is, by trying every possible key and seeing which one works – in just a few seconds.

This is what libdvdcss does. With libdvdcss installed on Linux, after you insert a DVD into your computer’s DVD drive, your computer will brute-force its encryption in a few seconds. It may look like the DVD is just opening in VLC, but your computer is cracking the encryption key in the background to make it viewable.

If you don’t have libdvdcss installed, DVDs won’t play back at all.

Legal Status

Unlike DeCSS, there have been no legal challenges against libdvdcss in particular, although it appears to be illegal under the DMCA.

Court rulings in the US have affirmed that breaking CSS encryption is a violation of the DMCA. RealNetworks once produced RealDVD, an application that allowed users to copy their own DVDs and create digital copies – essentially ripping them, as people rip audio CDs.

The DVD CCA argued that, although Real had licensed CSS encryption support from them, this was a violation of their agreement and a violation of the DMCA. The courts ruled that Real had violated the DMCA’s anti-circumvention measures. Other DVD-ripping applications, such as the popular Handbrake, are also illegal under the DMCA, although they’re widely available on the Internet.

While the DMCA has an exemptions process – this is why it’s legal to jailbreak a phone (but not a tablet) – an exemption has never been granted for watching DVDs on Linux. The government continues to consider this illegal, just as it considers ripping DVDs to your computer illegal.

Update: As of January, it’s not legal to unlock your phone without the permission of the carrier that you bought it from, assuming they locked it in the first place. You can buy an unlocked phone, of course, but that will cost more.

Actually, Linux Has a Few Licensed DVD Players

It was once true that Linux users had to become criminals to watch commercial video DVDs (at least in the USA). However, there are now licensed DVD players available for Linux.

For example, Ubuntu’s Software Center offers the licensed Fluendo DVD Player. This DVD player will cost you $25, although you have probably already paid for licensed DVD-playback software that comes with your computer’s DVD drive in the first place. If you purchased the licensed Cyberlink DVD player, which was previously the only legal option for watching DVDs on Linux in the USA, you probably need to buy the Fluendo DVD Player to play DVDs on modern versions of Ubuntu.

In practice, most Linux users will Google up a solution to watching DVDs on Linux and install libdvdcss, which is free and allows them to watch DVDs in VLC and other media players they already use.

We’re not lawyers here, and it’s certainly unclear whether this would stand up in court, just as it’s unclear if the courts would uphold a prosecution against someone for unlocking a cell phone or jailbreaking an iPad. However, this is what the DMCA says.

Laws as bad as this one aren’t restricted to the USA alone – other countries may have similar laws. For example, Canada now has a law that makes “breaking a digital lock” illegal, which would also make this illegal in Canada.

When You Program Microsoft, You're Programming Communism

Fish - Smart New User Friendly Command Line Shell For OS X, Linux, & Nix Family OS'

I've just switched over officially. Until recently I've used bash almost exclusively and had minimal experience with korn shell and good ol' /bin/sh and had no interest in changing my default shell, most likely because of a lack of alternatives. Fish has provided that alternative. The enhanced tab completion/manpage integration sold me on it's own. It also has syntax highlighting and autosuggestions just from the short test drive I took it on was a joy to use. For the most part any bash or korn shell user will not be thrown off by anything and should be pleasantly surprised at the extra features. I haven't checked out all the goodies in this shell but they make it ridiculously easy to get all your docs in one place in html format by typing help at the prompt.


Fish Shell Homepage [download]

Alternative Download

If you're on a debian system you can just check your software manager for the .deb file and install from there.

Set Fish As Default Terminal

For those wishing to switch Fish to their default terminal just toss this in a terminal then reboot to load the new default.
[sourcecode language="bash"]
usermod -s /usr/bin/fish <username>
[/sourcecode]

Krita - Great Alternative To Photoshop For Linux Users, Geared Towards Comics And Fine Art

For Debian based *nix distros, you can install as easy as:
[sourcecode language="bash"][/sourcecode]
apt-get install krita
[sourcecode][/sourcecode]

About Krita
Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end. Krita is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters and in the digital VFX industry.

Krita is free software, licensed under the GNU Public License, version 2 or later.

Krita has several features that are unique or a first among free software painting applications: support for colorspaces other than RGB, like CMYK, support for HDR painting, painting assistants, a perspective grid. The Krita developers are keen to support the artistic community that has grown around Krita.

The name "Krita" comes from Swedish, and means "to draw" or "chalk" and was taken after the names "KImageShop" and "Krayon" gave problems.

A guide to Krita's features is available in PDF format: aboutkrita26.pdf

Krita Homepage

Krita Demos

http://youtu.be/7u_rIn5ihLU
http://youtu.be/V1JKQ9FLAXg

Ubuntu Phone Download & Source Will Arrive February At MWC. Only Support For Galaxy Nexus For Now

I really hope they keep working on this and start expanding support to other devices.

At last weeks press event unveiling the device, Mark Shuttleworth had said that an image would be available ‘in the coming weeks’ – so why the delay?


Canonical’s Richard Collins has said that it’s to allow them time to “maximize all the attention we want to gain [with it]“.


Read: make sure it works better when all eyes are on it.


A specific date in unknown but it’s probable that the release will coincide with Canonical’s appearance at the Mobile World Congress 2013, being held between 25 – 28th of February.


The downloadable image will be for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus - the main device currently used by Canonical for demoing the OS.

Ubuntu Phone Demo At CES 2013

I want!
http://youtu.be/RO7QbCqFY7Y