Information freedom for open source users.

There was a time when Linux was notorious for having what was called “fugly” fonts. Things improved a bit over the years, but thanks to expiring patents things are about to get even better. more>>

An anonymous reader writes “It’s not exactly official, but should also surprise no one: According to a new study the psychological profile of iPad owners can be summed up as “selfish elites” while have-not critics are “independent geeks.” Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance, while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness. In other words, “selfish elites.”"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), COO Kevin Turner told attendees that Microsoft’s archrival Apple is now No. 1 in software vulnerabilities, with database rival Oracle in the No. 2 spot.

Neelie Kroes is IT Chief for Europe and a staunch proponent of Open Source Software. A previous Linux Journal article made mention of her recent
comments on OSS vs. proprietary software: more>>

Apple has responded to press inquiries about the hacking of iTunes user accounts and fraudulent purchases made through its App Store, but the company has yet to come clean about the extent of the incident or the pressing questions it raises about the securi

As part of Monday’s iOS 4 upgrade, Apple patched a record 65 vulnerabilities in the iPhone, more than half of them critical.

Apple released iOS 4 for the iPhone 3G and 3GS, and the second- and third-generation iPod Touch on Monday shortly after 1 p.m. ET, 10 a.m. PT.

Ten months after it debuted rudimentary malware scanning in Snow Leopard, Apple last week quietly added a signature for a third piece of malware, security researchers reported.

Apple on Tuesday patched 28 vulnerabilities in is Snow Leopard operating system, including two in Adobe’s Flash Player.

But in another example of the tension between the two companies — sparked by Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ rejection of Flash as slow, buggy and obsolete — Adobe immediately countered by noting that Apple’s Flash fixes were already outdated.

Apple’s reputation for security continues to take hits as hacker group Goatse Security today accused the company of failing to patch a flaw in Safari — known

Apple on Monday shipped the latest version of its Safari browser, patching a record 48 vulnerabilities, including one that a pair of hackers exploited in March to win a $15,000 prize.

The new browser debuted the same day as Apple unveiled the iPhone 4 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Two years after fixing a security bug in the Windows version of its Safari browser, Apple apparently has decided that Mac users can go without a fix.

theodp writes “Provoked by an iPad ad promising a ‘revolution,’ Valleywag’s Ryan Tate fired off a late-night missive to Steve Jobs. Jobs responded, and the two engaged in an after-midnight e-mail debate over lockdown, Cocoa vs. Flash, battery life, and whether ‘freedom from porn’ is a bug or a feature. ‘The times they are a changin’,’ quipped Jobs, ‘and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.’ Tate was unswayed by the Apple CEO’s reality distortion field, but did come away impressed by Jobs’ willingness to spar one-on-one over his beliefs. At 2:00 in the morning on a weekend.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plocmstart writes “Here’s what EETimes.com is claiming to be the first teardown of the A4 processor. ‘Apple’s iPad chip is a single-core ARM A8 made by Samsung. Through various benchmarking testing, UBM TechInsights was able to find out the details of the A4 processor.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

medcalf notes that Game designer Ian Bogost enters the debate about Flash by saying

“[A] large number of developers seem to think that they have the right to make software for the iPhone (or for anything else) in Flash, or in another high-level environment of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity. And many of them are quite churlish about the matter.

This strikes me as a very strange sort of attitude to adopt. There’s no question that Flash is useful and popular, and it has a large and committed user base. There’s also no question that it’s often convenient to be able to program for different platforms using environments one already knows. And likewise, there’s a long history of creating OS stubs or wrappers or other sorts of gizmos to make it possible to run code ‘alien’ to a platform in a fashion that makes it feel more native.

But what does it say about the state of programming practice writ large when so many developers believe that their ‘rights’ are trampled because they cannot write programs for a particular device in a particular language? Or that their ‘freedom’ as creators is squelched for the same reason?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jamiegau writes “Here we have a very long and in depth blog post analysing the faults in Steve Job’s Letter about Flash. The writer concludes with an interesting idea that it is all about online video.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the wake of Google’s purchase of BumpTop, with its unique user interface, and BumpTop’s decision to close down its work on Windows and the Mac OS, the question needs to be asked.

Will the Chromium OS remain open source?

As you can see from the video above, this has always been the promise. The Chromium source code is freely available. Just like Linux, on which it is based.

(Our Zach Whittaker saw BumpTop, which debuted at the 2007 TED Conference, last year, and was very impressed.)

The promise of open source has always been that it stirs open innovation, and no company believes in that more firmly than Google. But when Google needed something to get it over Apple, which had sued HTC over its use of multitouch, it bought the solution.

So now why should it share? Especially with Apple, which based its Mac OS on Linux.

Google launched the first version of Chromium late last year, but while Android has proven popular with manufacturers, no one has yet announced any plans to use Chromium. Some blogs, in fact, are already speculating that Android is the final destination for BumpTop. not Chromium at all.

Which leads to the larger question of differentiation. How does Google turn Chromium into something unique, something separate from Android, with its own value proposition? Especially if the Android team can just grab cool, new stuff like BumpTop and throw it onto a phone?

How does Google control BumpTop so it remains a unique experience? How does it keep out all the “baby Bumps” that may kluge parts of it together with other stuff and build incompatible, even proprietary, knock-offs?

The only answer to those questions is to close the code. I would dearly love to be wrong on this, but I don’t see another way for Google to maximize the value of the buy.

Tell me I’m wrong. (And tell me why.)

Regardless of the merits of a case against open codecs Ogg Theora and VP8 for patent infringement a very important question remains unanswered.

Who will pay the lawyer bills?

NoSoftwarePatents founder Florian “Floyd” Mueller (left), who was last seen here being panned for fighting the Oracle acquisition of mySQL, fears it may be Apple.

“While Microsoft doesn’t try to force any Android phone vendor out of the market, Apple uses some of its own patents very aggressively in order to prevent such companies as HTC from providing certain functionality at all,” Mueller wrote me late last week.

“It’s important to see the difference from the perspective of competitors and consumers: the worst thing that can happen with patents is if vendors, especially leading ones, use their patents for exclusionary purposes.

“Should Apple be a contributor to the patent pool Steve Jobs mentioned, that would be very bad news because then the objective may very well be to prevent any commercial use and distribution of Ogg Theora and other open-source video codecs.”

Mueller has long been concerned with the patent status of open source codecs, writing at FOSS Patents after Google announced VP8 would be open source that multimedia is a patent minefield.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Google or any other vendor or a FOSS project: there’s no such thing as a multimedia data format that anyone can absolutely guarantee to be unencumbered by patents.

This is one reason Mueller, who started in this business as a 16-year old computer journalist in 1986, launched his campaign against software patents.

All this makes the pending decision in Bilski vs. Kappos, still unknown at this writing, so important. A decision that encourages Apple to proceed, especially against Google, may make for the biggest lawsuit of all time.

The FUD attack launched against Ogg Theora and VP8, the very idea that they violate patents, is not aimed at the courts, but at the W3C, which held a conference on the coming HTML5 standards last week in Raleigh.

While audio and video files are currently handled through object tags, HTML5 will support standard audio and video tags, support for which will be defined in the browser.

Microsoft and Apple are carrying the water of the content industries, which fear that losing control of the technology under which content is displayed results in losing control of the content itself. That control is expressed through the MPEG LA licensing body.

The $5 million license fee for the H.264 codec required by MPEG LA acts as a barrier to entry, both a financial and moral one. A licensee that doesn’t follow Hollywood’s rules could have its license pulled, and thus its product.

The money is chump change for Microsoft, and the barrier a good thing.  It’s a matter of principle for open source.

HTML5 is where that principle is being contested. The W3C policy is not to accept a royalty-bearing, proprietary technology into the Web standard. That’s why video has, until now, been a function separate from the browser.

The attack came now because Mozilla, makers of Firefox, only wants to support truly open codecs under HTML5. Google’s move to open source of VP8 is also said to be preparatory to making it the default codec in Chrome.

If open source becomes the default for HTML5 in Chrome and Firefox (and Opera too) Hollywood loses its technical control. Thus the dark claim by Jobs that a ” patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other ‘open source’ codecs now.”

The case is a nonsense.

If Ogg Theora were subject to patent, why would those patent holders allow nearly 160 million downloads (at last count) of the VLC Player, which contains it. Then there’s the question of whether any software patent is valid — we’re still waiting on a Supreme Court decision in Bilski vs. Kappos to settle that question.

Apple and Microsoft have made their money on video by doing what the video owners want. They want to control the Web’s video technology. So Microsoft will only support H.264, Apple darkly mutters about patent suits, and the W3C is supposed to knuckle under, making a proprietary technology part of the Web standard.

If pressed, I have no doubt that a suit would be filed. But even the filing of a suit does not always represent a desire to go to court, only a willingness to do so as part of a larger negotiation.

The suit would magically disappear if H.264 became the Web standard for video, and everyone who wanted to watch a video online were forced to have their software license that codec from MPEG LA.

That’s the issue squarely facing the W3C now.

It’s a cliché that Microsoft’s Windows, Outlook, and Office are prime venues for malware and hackers to get into your PCs and networks. But in recent years, Microsoft has tightened up its security issues — and Adobe Systems has increasingly become the sloppy vendor whose products such as Acrobat and Flash increasingly pose the security holes that bedevil IT. And Apple could be next.

The seizure of Jason Chen’s stuff for getting his hands on a pre-beta iPhone took me back 25 years, then dropped me back into the present.

Back in the spring of 1985 I was preparing to join Newsbytes, an online news service then hosted at The Source, but there was a problem with our other hire, Englishman Steve Gold.

He had just been arrested.

Steve was, like me (and like Jason) a freelance writer. He was doing some security work for the old Prestel network, and hacked into it. For this he would stand trial, be convicted, and live in legal limbo for years until the Law Lords finally overturned it.

The question on that spring day of 1985 was whether Steve was a risky hire. Emphatically no, I said. Why, he’s a made man. If you’re not willing to skate on thin ice to do your job, that would be a problem.

Flash forward 25 years. It seems little has changed. Judging from his blog, Jason has the kinds of obsessions, like video games, associated with my son’s generation. He’s like Steve.

But this is not a story that resonates at all with open source. A proprietary vendor feels that its secrets have been compromised. It wants people to ooh and aah when they see the new iPhone has two cameras, that you can hold it up and engage in videoconferencing.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a (well I live in Atlanta, what else was I supposed to say?).

It is true that if someone got their hands on the next HTC or Motorola Android phone, there might be a stink. But it would not be that great. The Android code, the capabilities it supports, are transparent and available. Vendors can choose among the options.

Is there any such thing as pre-release code in the open source world? All repositories have some, but the word for such code is buggy. It’s worthless. Pre-release code gains value only after it’s tested and accepted formally into the code base — in other words when it’s released. We need find no code before its time.

Here at ZDNet Open source, I have long known that our most popular stories are straightforward announcements of code releases and new features. My co-blogger Paula Rooney is great at getting those stories in to us and you show her your love for it. Numbers don’t lie.

The kind of stuff I specialize in — asking questions of vendors, readers, and government — stirring up controversy, it’s not so popular with y’all. But going undercover to get behind a curtain, grabbing untested products before they’re ready, that’s not really a story in an open source world.

Back in Steve Gold’s home of old blighty, this whole case is being laughed at. The American press is said to be in the tank for vendors, and its reaction to the Chen case is being cited as an example of why British reporters are just better.

I know that’s still true in one case. But how do y’all feel about it?