First of all, Microsoft does *not* have "nothing to worry about" with H.264. Just because it pays tribute (er, licenses patents) from one organization does *NOT* mean that it's protected from all other organizations. In fact, once you demonstrate that you're willing to pay to one organization, others will start to show up to get some money too. For an analogy, look at the history of the Vikings; once people started paying tribute, the odds of looting parties showing up INCREASED. And we don't have to just use analogies; look at the recent history of sound codecs, specifically MP3. Microsoft paid big$ tribute for MP3, but Alcatel-Lucent sued Microsoft and won a record-breaking $1.52 billion in damages via a jury verdict. Now it's true that Microsoft got lucky in that one; in the MP3 case, a judge reversed the jury, a highly unusual event. If a judge hadn't reversed it, Microsoft would have paid $1.52 billion in additional damages for something it had ALREADY PAID LICENSE FEES for. And even so, Microsoft spent a FORTUNE in court on MP3, a codec that it was already paying license fees for. So it appears that "licensed" codecs have a HIGHER risk, not a lower risk, historically speaking. Wikipedia has more about the MP3 patent stuff.
Second of all, there's already been a lot of money and research spent to make sure that Ogg Theora is free of patent issues. Few things in life are "conclusively proven"; let's use realistic measures. The evidence, in this case, is really strong that Ogg is safe. Strictly speaking, it's not that Ogg Theora is patent-free, it's that all known required patents have been released under and irrevocable free license. That is actually a stronger legal position than simply "not knowing of any patents"... here we have a granted patent, which is then released. The Ogg folks spent $ to do their own legal searches, too, something standards bodies emphatically do NOT do, giving you additional protection. Most companies that claim that "Ogg has unknown patent issues" are basically flinging FUD; it's mainly a protest claimed by companies who have a vested interest (a kickback) from the patent licenses. In particular, it's my understanding that Apple *makes* money from the H.264 patents. So unsurprisingly, Apple works to lock everyone else into the patents they partly control, and actively works to *prevent* the use of open standards for codecs. But you don't need to buy into that.
Sure, it's always possible that there are unknown submarine patents, but submarine patents are risk to all codecs, including H.264; that is not specifically a risk to Ogg Theora. Indeed, H.264 is MORE dangerous. Because H.264 was developed in an environment where patents were permitted (for shame, ISO), and there was no *requirement* for an external patent search (ISO doesn't require it), there was an incentive to patent everything, both by the participating parties and by external parties. There have been a number of court cases about MP3, but none about Vorbis, which shows that once you let patents into a standards process, things can get really bad.
Someday, someone may find a patent problem with Ogg Theora, but this is highly unlikely. In contrast, we have hideous patent problems with H.264, today. Why worry about Ogg, when there's a wolf already in tent? We need to dump H.264 (with its KNOWN problems) and switch to Ogg (which has NO known problems). First step: Get the browsers to support Ogg Theora. Then websites can more rationally use the format.
It's better for Microsoft's customers: They can then easily use an open standard.
It's also better for Microsoft: If more people use an open standard, they won't be as beholden to the H.264 licensors and will reduce the risk of me-too lawsuits like that of Alcatel-Lucent.
No, everyone is NOT on board. For example, Wikipedia explicitly forbids MP3 and H.264, and only accepts Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. If you want to hear audio or see videos on Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular web services, then you MUST use Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis.
And as you know, Firefox (one of the most popular web browsers and growing) includes built-in support for Ogg and NOT for H.264.
Many sites, and many operating systems (such as Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, etc.) do NOT support H.264.
Please go to http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/contact.aspx and ask Microsoft to add support for Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. They could add it to the browser, or add support for it to the OS and then have the browser support it. They can support both H.264 and Ogg if they want to. For example, there are many sites like Wikipedia which *ONLY* permit Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis for multimedia; without built-in support, IE users have trouble hearing/viewing the content.
Facebook has now changed their policy to eliminate privacy, in particular, friend lists are always public.
At one time you could make this private, as noted in this report.
I made my own friend list private when I first joined it, but Facebook now ignores my configuration.
If you can make friend lists private, please let know how... it sure isn't easy, and Facebook's
current documentation says that it cannot be made private.
Making public the private data you gave a company, without your consent, should be illegal.... but it appears that Facebook can do it with impunity.
I've mostly stopped using Facebook because Facebook seems to be becoming actively hostile to privacy of any kind.
Please support proposals such as the proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) called
"Public funding = Public viewing" (by voting for them, making positive comments, etc.). This proposal recommends that
publicly funded projects must be published as open access and all data and code shared as open source software.
If "We the people" pay for research and development, then "we the people" should get the results.
If there aren't existing proposals for certain agencies, please add them.
Apple is primarily a *hardware* company - it sells Macs and iPhones, which are physical devices. Yes, it has to write software to make that hardware useful, but the software is intentionally not sold separately... you can only get the software by getting the hardware. So comparing Apple to software organizations misses the point... they're not really doing the same thing. Also, there's a lot of OSS inside the Mac (e.g., much of FreeBSD), so even if you look at the software, it's not either/or.
The statement "haven't produced anything remotely as useful" is also nonsense. Let's see, how about the Internet, including TCP/IP and DNS? Web servers? As far as end-user products, Android phones (including Droid) and the XO are certainly useful. OSS has produced lots of useful things.
The current patent system presumes that "everything worth inventing, that has been invented, already has a patent". That wasn't really true in the late 1700s, and is completely nonsense today.
Eben Moglen made an interesting point about patents back in 2009.
Today, any time the government wants to create a new rule/regulation, they must normally ensure that the public can participate/review/comment on it.
Also, the government must show that the benefits of the rule/regulation exceeds its costs.
All of this is courtesy of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (aka the APA).
The APA is no garden of perfection, but it has helped.
The big exception is the patent system, which predates the APA, and thus patents are exempt
from the APA.
In the patent system, there is no opportunity for the public to participate/review/comment on each patent,
and there is no requirement to show that the benefits of granting a patent exceeds its costs.
Which is weird, because patents (as government-granted monopolies) can have as wide an effect as any other rule or regulation.
We need to get rid of software and business method patents,
at least, but changing the patent system to require public review and a demonstration that costs exceeded benefits
would help too.
Linux Weekly News (LWN.net) has managed to keep going by having a temporary paywall. That is, you pay to get immediate access to articles, and after a week, anyone can see them. This might work in some cases, at the least, you could generate some revenue if people were willing to pay for immediate access, while not driving away the authors who want many readers. I will say that for LWN, they're making some money but they certainly aren't rolling in it, so even if that works, it will not bring back the massive money inflows that these organizations are used to.
Let's be honest: There is a glut of news organizations, and consolidation WILL happen. The internet has permanently changed the market. I don't see that the U.S. government needs to get involved; we have NOT lost the ability to receive news. Yes, many news organizations are going out of business, and in the future we will need fewer of them. But that's simply how competition works.
I don't think that EVERY program funded by the government should be released to the public. If it's classified for good reason (say, its purpose is to explode a nuclear bomb), then I think it should definitely NOT get to the public. But if we made openness the DEFAULT, that would eliminate a lot of nonsense.
No, the federal government can hold copyrights. US law says that whatever a government official does, as part of his official duties, is not subject to copyright. Today, most software developed for the US government is developed by contractors, who CAN hold copyrights, and they can assign those copyrights to the federal government. Some contracts even REQUIRE that the copyright be transferred to the US government.
This is documented, and in multiple places.
My Program Library HOWTO, section "Shared Libraries",
says the following, and it's dated in 2000:
"Beware: do not run ldd on a program you don't trust. As is clearly stated in the ldd(1) manual, ldd works by (in certain cases) by setting a special environment variable (for ELF objects, LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS) and then executing the program. It may be possible for an untrusted program to force the ldd user to run arbitrary code (instead of simply showing the ldd information). So, for safety's sake, don't use ldd on programs you don't trust to execute."
Now I'd agree that it would better if ldd were changed to NOT do this. If the result of this article is a change in its code to not do this, that would be a great result. But it's simply not true that this is undocumented.
The PTO *should* will deny this application as obvious. This tries to patent disabling computer functionality when an ad runs. Lots of web sites already do this... you often can't see the "real" content without sitting through an ad. DVD players have been doing this too.
Of course, for the last number of years the PTO has decided that its job is to grant the maximum number of patents to patent requestors, and NOT to protect the public from invalid patents,
so expecting the PTO to follow common sense may be asking for too much.
Sigh.
I actually think patents have a place, but if we must continue to have nonsense like software patents and business method patents, it may be better to eliminate the patent system entirely; unless the Supreme Court can scale them back, they patent system is causing more harm than good.
What about reviving umsdos? At one time, Linux's "umsdos" filesystem was FAT plus extra "hidden" information that let you store file permissions, uid, etc. If I remember correctly, one annoyance was what to do about differing UID's. But this wouldn't be that hard to handle; a mount option could be added that made it appear that the user-mounter owned all the files (which is not bad model for a USB stick). That way, you could easily store and retrieve files with the correct execute permissions (no, I do NOT need to execute JPEGs), note which files are read-only, and so on.
Or, if reviving umsdos is too much, maybe there'd be a way to modify Linux so that its FATS32 implementation is "a little more useful".
When exchanging files on a stick, I find that you often don't need exotic permission capabilities. The uid is often unnecessary, since it's a different computer anyway. Just noting which files are executable and which are writable by the owner is all that most people need on a stick.
But NOT having those is incredibly annoying; it's stupid that JPEGs come out executable.
FAT32 already has a "read only" bit for file attributes; basically, interpret that as the inverse of a write bit (make everything writeable unless it's read-only).
For "executable", maybe you could use an "unused" file attribute bit or two (00=unknown/use some other method, 01=executable, 10=not executable, 11=???).
An implementation that knew about the new bits would use them, otherwise, situation normal. Byte 0xc has 6 unused bytes, and we only need 2 for this scheme.
You could steal a few more bits and at least implement "user" and "other" (and make "group=other"), or even implement all 9 traditional bits.
I think most people could live without the sticky bit, or setuid, on FAT32:-).
NTFS and "Universal Disk Format" may be the best you can do for now if you want to exchange files with permission info. But there are still many systems which can't read them well, so FAT32 ends up being the "easy" road. If you "zip" up the files first, almost everyone can read them (tar works, but most Windows users can't read tar files... they're more likely to be able to read zip files).
Sure, some lawyers twist the meaning of words... so let's call them on it.
But the U.S. government (USG) already has an official definition of "open source software", and it is NOT "you can read it".
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) M-04-16 defines the term "open source software", saying that
"Open Source Softwareâ(TM)s source code is widely available so it may be used, copied, modified, and redistributed". It's really the "Free Software Definition", but the OSI definition and the Free Software Definition are very, very, very close in practice. And that OMB memo is an official document.
IBM makes piles of money from patents, so no one should be surprised that IBM is for getting more money. But that does not mean it is good for the country. What's more, the Supreme Court has NEVER held that software algorithms are patentable, and the U.S. experiment into software patents has shown that the Supremes were wiser than the patent lawyers. Whether they're willing to make that stick now or not is the big question.
ISO (among other organizations) creates international standards, but not all standards are open. If you're adding the adjective "open" to the noun "standard", then presumably the adjective modifies the noun in some way. Yes, we then get to argue about what the term "open" means when attached to the term "standard", but clearly it can't just mean "it's a standard", or we wouldn't add the adjective.
If implementers have to make royalty payments, then that excludes many possible suppliers, and thus such a standard cannot possibly be open.
That isn't just my idea; the EU, for example, agrees. In
"European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services" (Version 1.0, 2004, page 9), the IDABC division of European Union adopted a definition that said that to be an open standard "The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis."
The South Africa definition already requires royalty-freeness as well. My paper
Is OpenDocument an Open Standard? Yes! analyzes one standard (OpenDocument) to determine if it's an open standard, by using several definitions of open standard. Two of the three most popular definitions of "open standard" of the time, as determined by Google, required royalty-freeness as a necessary condition (Perens' and the EC's).
Since Google's pagerank algorithm prefers pages that more people link to, it's reasonable to believe that most people, when they say "open standard", include "royalty-free" as part of their definition. In the case of Europe and South Africa (at least), that definition even has official sanction.
If "most people" use a term in a particular way - especially when that use is formally approved of by many governments - then that's what the term normally means.
After all, that's how language works in general; the mapping of sounds to meanings is arbitrary, but we have to agree on the mapping to communicate in a particular language.
It's understandable why some companies would like to redefine this term, or at least confuse its meaning. But we don't need to agree with them.
It's true that "GPL" is not the same as "open". But a good test for openness of a standard is "can you implement it using the GPL?". In short, if a standard CANNOT be implemented by GPL'ed software, then it CANNOT be an open standard. Why? That's because the GPL is by far the most popular open source software license; nothing else even comes close. And increasingly, major market niches have an open source software implementation as the #1 or #2 implementation. A standard that locks out major implementations cannot possibly be an open standard. The whole point of a software patent is the power to exclude implementation (without paying royalties, etc.), while the whole point of a standard is to allow arbitrary use - they are fundamentally incompatible. Digistan has a more reasonable definition of open standard - and why you would want one.
FTP, rsync+ssh
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
FTP is still fine for providing big files that don't need to be protected by a password. But yes, if you're CHANGING data, raw ftp is usually a bad idea.
If you're uploading files, I heartily recommend using rsync+ssh. It's incredibly fast, since only the files that CHANGED are uploaded, and ssh makes it all secure.
It can be a pain to set up on some cheap hosting sites, but I've figured out how to make rsync+ssh work even on some cheap hosting sites.
Hope that helps.
Mozilla certainly DOES care about end-users and developers. Unlike the others, they have NO reason to do anything OTHER than produce a high-quality browser. (They're not perfect, but at least they have every incentive to try.) The problem is that the U.S. patent system makes it illegal for community-developed software to implement patent-encumbered standards. Mozilla, etc., would be happy to include other codecs if it were legal for them to do so.
At this time, there's only one practical pair of open standards for video and audio: Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. Other audio/video formats, like MP3 and H.*, are not open standards. It would cost almost NOTHING for Microsoft and Apple to implement the Ogg open standards; the only reason they don't include them is because (for various reasons) they explicitly do NOT want open standards to succeed. So the lines are pretty clear here: There's only one practical pair of open standards (Ogg Vorbis and Theora), open standards are good for end-users (eliminating control of others over their data), it's illegal for Mozilla etc. to include the other formats, and the other organizations are working hard to prevent adoption of open standards that would cost nearly nothing for them to implement.
There's a simple solution, anyway. Now that Firefox has Theora and Vorbis built-in, various OSS-friendly sites like Wikipedia should just switch and REQUIRE that to view audio/video, users MUST have support. Then users have a reason to demand support for unencumbered standards... or switch to browsers that implement the unencumbered standards.
Codecs have a chicken-and-egg problem, but with enough material and enough users, they become a virtuous cycle.
Eventually, the other browsers will need to implement open standards, or they will get killed by their competition.
And once there's an open standard in place that is "good enough", it will get harder and harder (over time) to justify using the non-open formats.
Slashdot Mirror
The latest studies seem to say that Ogg Theora is "more than good enough" for web video. See: http://hacks.stage.mozilla.com/2009/06/open-video-codecs-and-quality/ http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/firefogg_transcoding_videos_open_web_standards_mozilla_firefox
No MathML? No Ogg? Only works on Vista or newer? And look at the SVG "doesn't implement" list... what it DOESN'T do is rather painful.
Nonsense.
First of all, Microsoft does *not* have "nothing to worry about" with H.264. Just because it pays tribute (er, licenses patents) from one organization does *NOT* mean that it's protected from all other organizations. In fact, once you demonstrate that you're willing to pay to one organization, others will start to show up to get some money too. For an analogy, look at the history of the Vikings; once people started paying tribute, the odds of looting parties showing up INCREASED. And we don't have to just use analogies; look at the recent history of sound codecs, specifically MP3. Microsoft paid big$ tribute for MP3, but Alcatel-Lucent sued Microsoft and won a record-breaking $1.52 billion in damages via a jury verdict. Now it's true that Microsoft got lucky in that one; in the MP3 case, a judge reversed the jury, a highly unusual event. If a judge hadn't reversed it, Microsoft would have paid $1.52 billion in additional damages for something it had ALREADY PAID LICENSE FEES for. And even so, Microsoft spent a FORTUNE in court on MP3, a codec that it was already paying license fees for. So it appears that "licensed" codecs have a HIGHER risk, not a lower risk, historically speaking. Wikipedia has more about the MP3 patent stuff.
Second of all, there's already been a lot of money and research spent to make sure that Ogg Theora is free of patent issues. Few things in life are "conclusively proven"; let's use realistic measures. The evidence, in this case, is really strong that Ogg is safe. Strictly speaking, it's not that Ogg Theora is patent-free, it's that all known required patents have been released under and irrevocable free license. That is actually a stronger legal position than simply "not knowing of any patents"... here we have a granted patent, which is then released. The Ogg folks spent $ to do their own legal searches, too, something standards bodies emphatically do NOT do, giving you additional protection. Most companies that claim that "Ogg has unknown patent issues" are basically flinging FUD; it's mainly a protest claimed by companies who have a vested interest (a kickback) from the patent licenses. In particular, it's my understanding that Apple *makes* money from the H.264 patents. So unsurprisingly, Apple works to lock everyone else into the patents they partly control, and actively works to *prevent* the use of open standards for codecs. But you don't need to buy into that.
Sure, it's always possible that there are unknown submarine patents, but submarine patents are risk to all codecs, including H.264; that is not specifically a risk to Ogg Theora. Indeed, H.264 is MORE dangerous. Because H.264 was developed in an environment where patents were permitted (for shame, ISO), and there was no *requirement* for an external patent search (ISO doesn't require it), there was an incentive to patent everything, both by the participating parties and by external parties. There have been a number of court cases about MP3, but none about Vorbis, which shows that once you let patents into a standards process, things can get really bad.
Someday, someone may find a patent problem with Ogg Theora, but this is highly unlikely. In contrast, we have hideous patent problems with H.264, today. Why worry about Ogg, when there's a wolf already in tent? We need to dump H.264 (with its KNOWN problems) and switch to Ogg (which has NO known problems). First step: Get the browsers to support Ogg Theora. Then websites can more rationally use the format. It's better for Microsoft's customers: They can then easily use an open standard. It's also better for Microsoft: If more people use an open standard, they won't be as beholden to the H.264 licensors and will reduce the risk of me-too lawsuits like that of Alcatel-Lucent.
No, not even slightly true. The primary reason that PNG was created was to create a patent-free format. Then, since they were creating a format anyway, they decided to make other improvements. For more information, see "History of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Format" by Greg Roelofs, which was published by the Linux Gazette and later the Linux Journal. I know, this is Slashdot, I'm not allowed to cite sources :-).
No, everyone is NOT on board. For example, Wikipedia explicitly forbids MP3 and H.264, and only accepts Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. If you want to hear audio or see videos on Wikipedia, one of the world's most popular web services, then you MUST use Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. And as you know, Firefox (one of the most popular web browsers and growing) includes built-in support for Ogg and NOT for H.264. Many sites, and many operating systems (such as Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, etc.) do NOT support H.264.
Please go to http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/contact.aspx and ask Microsoft to add support for Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. They could add it to the browser, or add support for it to the OS and then have the browser support it. They can support both H.264 and Ogg if they want to. For example, there are many sites like Wikipedia which *ONLY* permit Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis for multimedia; without built-in support, IE users have trouble hearing/viewing the content.
Facebook has now changed their policy to eliminate privacy, in particular, friend lists are always public. At one time you could make this private, as noted in this report. I made my own friend list private when I first joined it, but Facebook now ignores my configuration. If you can make friend lists private, please let know how... it sure isn't easy, and Facebook's current documentation says that it cannot be made private.
Making public the private data you gave a company, without your consent, should be illegal.... but it appears that Facebook can do it with impunity. I've mostly stopped using Facebook because Facebook seems to be becoming actively hostile to privacy of any kind.
Please support proposals such as the proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) called "Public funding = Public viewing" (by voting for them, making positive comments, etc.). This proposal recommends that publicly funded projects must be published as open access and all data and code shared as open source software. If "We the people" pay for research and development, then "we the people" should get the results. If there aren't existing proposals for certain agencies, please add them.
As I've commented before, Government-developed Unclassified Software should be default be released as Open Source Software, and U.S. research should be open access. The current model, especially for research and development, isn't working.
The statement "haven't produced anything remotely as useful" is also nonsense. Let's see, how about the Internet, including TCP/IP and DNS? Web servers? As far as end-user products, Android phones (including Droid) and the XO are certainly useful. OSS has produced lots of useful things.
The current patent system presumes that "everything worth inventing, that has been invented, already has a patent". That wasn't really true in the late 1700s, and is completely nonsense today.
Eben Moglen made an interesting point about patents back in 2009. Today, any time the government wants to create a new rule/regulation, they must normally ensure that the public can participate/review/comment on it. Also, the government must show that the benefits of the rule/regulation exceeds its costs. All of this is courtesy of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (aka the APA). The APA is no garden of perfection, but it has helped. The big exception is the patent system, which predates the APA, and thus patents are exempt from the APA. In the patent system, there is no opportunity for the public to participate/review/comment on each patent, and there is no requirement to show that the benefits of granting a patent exceeds its costs. Which is weird, because patents (as government-granted monopolies) can have as wide an effect as any other rule or regulation. We need to get rid of software and business method patents, at least, but changing the patent system to require public review and a demonstration that costs exceeded benefits would help too.
They missed some hideously-bad ads for Microsoft.
My favorite "bad Microsoft ad" is a 2000 TV ad, which uses the musical theme of "Confutatis Maledictis" from Mozart's Requiem. The screen says "Where do you want to go today?" while the chorus sings "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" ("The damned and accursed are convicted to the flames of Hell").
There's also a 2009 ad featuring a vomiting woman.
If you're running Windows, you might take a look at this page on securing Microsoft Windows. It might not SOLVE the problem, but it might help.
Linux Weekly News (LWN.net) has managed to keep going by having a temporary paywall. That is, you pay to get immediate access to articles, and after a week, anyone can see them. This might work in some cases, at the least, you could generate some revenue if people were willing to pay for immediate access, while not driving away the authors who want many readers. I will say that for LWN, they're making some money but they certainly aren't rolling in it, so even if that works, it will not bring back the massive money inflows that these organizations are used to.
Let's be honest: There is a glut of news organizations, and consolidation WILL happen. The internet has permanently changed the market. I don't see that the U.S. government needs to get involved; we have NOT lost the ability to receive news. Yes, many news organizations are going out of business, and in the future we will need fewer of them. But that's simply how competition works.
I make a similar argument in "Government-developed Unclassified Software: Default release as Open Source Software" - if "we the people" paid to develop software, then by default "we the people" should get it. This was one of the proposals in the open government dialogue, and many people voted for it.
I don't think that EVERY program funded by the government should be released to the public. If it's classified for good reason (say, its purpose is to explode a nuclear bomb), then I think it should definitely NOT get to the public. But if we made openness the DEFAULT, that would eliminate a lot of nonsense.
No, the federal government can hold copyrights. US law says that whatever a government official does, as part of his official duties, is not subject to copyright. Today, most software developed for the US government is developed by contractors, who CAN hold copyrights, and they can assign those copyrights to the federal government. Some contracts even REQUIRE that the copyright be transferred to the US government.
This is documented, and in multiple places. My Program Library HOWTO, section "Shared Libraries", says the following, and it's dated in 2000: "Beware: do not run ldd on a program you don't trust. As is clearly stated in the ldd(1) manual, ldd works by (in certain cases) by setting a special environment variable (for ELF objects, LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS) and then executing the program. It may be possible for an untrusted program to force the ldd user to run arbitrary code (instead of simply showing the ldd information). So, for safety's sake, don't use ldd on programs you don't trust to execute." Now I'd agree that it would better if ldd were changed to NOT do this. If the result of this article is a change in its code to not do this, that would be a great result. But it's simply not true that this is undocumented.
The PTO *should* will deny this application as obvious. This tries to patent disabling computer functionality when an ad runs. Lots of web sites already do this... you often can't see the "real" content without sitting through an ad. DVD players have been doing this too. Of course, for the last number of years the PTO has decided that its job is to grant the maximum number of patents to patent requestors, and NOT to protect the public from invalid patents, so expecting the PTO to follow common sense may be asking for too much. Sigh. I actually think patents have a place, but if we must continue to have nonsense like software patents and business method patents, it may be better to eliminate the patent system entirely; unless the Supreme Court can scale them back, they patent system is causing more harm than good.
Bruce is quite right. License incompatibility can be a real problem; by sticking to a small set of certain widely-used licenses, you avoid the problem. If you're interested in license compatibility issues, you might look at The Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) License Slide and Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else
What about reviving umsdos? At one time, Linux's "umsdos" filesystem was FAT plus extra "hidden" information that let you store file permissions, uid, etc. If I remember correctly, one annoyance was what to do about differing UID's. But this wouldn't be that hard to handle; a mount option could be added that made it appear that the user-mounter owned all the files (which is not bad model for a USB stick). That way, you could easily store and retrieve files with the correct execute permissions (no, I do NOT need to execute JPEGs), note which files are read-only, and so on.
:-).
Or, if reviving umsdos is too much, maybe there'd be a way to modify Linux so that its FATS32 implementation is "a little more useful". When exchanging files on a stick, I find that you often don't need exotic permission capabilities. The uid is often unnecessary, since it's a different computer anyway. Just noting which files are executable and which are writable by the owner is all that most people need on a stick. But NOT having those is incredibly annoying; it's stupid that JPEGs come out executable. FAT32 already has a "read only" bit for file attributes; basically, interpret that as the inverse of a write bit (make everything writeable unless it's read-only). For "executable", maybe you could use an "unused" file attribute bit or two (00=unknown/use some other method, 01=executable, 10=not executable, 11=???). An implementation that knew about the new bits would use them, otherwise, situation normal. Byte 0xc has 6 unused bytes, and we only need 2 for this scheme. You could steal a few more bits and at least implement "user" and "other" (and make "group=other"), or even implement all 9 traditional bits. I think most people could live without the sticky bit, or setuid, on FAT32
NTFS and "Universal Disk Format" may be the best you can do for now if you want to exchange files with permission info. But there are still many systems which can't read them well, so FAT32 ends up being the "easy" road. If you "zip" up the files first, almost everyone can read them (tar works, but most Windows users can't read tar files... they're more likely to be able to read zip files).
Sure, some lawyers twist the meaning of words... so let's call them on it. But the U.S. government (USG) already has an official definition of "open source software", and it is NOT "you can read it". Office of Management and Budget (OMB) M-04-16 defines the term "open source software", saying that "Open Source Softwareâ(TM)s source code is widely available so it may be used, copied, modified, and redistributed". It's really the "Free Software Definition", but the OSI definition and the Free Software Definition are very, very, very close in practice. And that OMB memo is an official document.
IBM makes piles of money from patents, so no one should be surprised that IBM is for getting more money. But that does not mean it is good for the country. What's more, the Supreme Court has NEVER held that software algorithms are patentable, and the U.S. experiment into software patents has shown that the Supremes were wiser than the patent lawyers. Whether they're willing to make that stick now or not is the big question.
It's not clear that the odds are great, but it would be great if someday the U.S. eliminated the madness of software patents.
ISO (among other organizations) creates international standards, but not all standards are open. If you're adding the adjective "open" to the noun "standard", then presumably the adjective modifies the noun in some way. Yes, we then get to argue about what the term "open" means when attached to the term "standard", but clearly it can't just mean "it's a standard", or we wouldn't add the adjective.
If implementers have to make royalty payments, then that excludes many possible suppliers, and thus such a standard cannot possibly be open. That isn't just my idea; the EU, for example, agrees. In "European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services" (Version 1.0, 2004, page 9), the IDABC division of European Union adopted a definition that said that to be an open standard "The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis." The South Africa definition already requires royalty-freeness as well. My paper Is OpenDocument an Open Standard? Yes! analyzes one standard (OpenDocument) to determine if it's an open standard, by using several definitions of open standard. Two of the three most popular definitions of "open standard" of the time, as determined by Google, required royalty-freeness as a necessary condition (Perens' and the EC's). Since Google's pagerank algorithm prefers pages that more people link to, it's reasonable to believe that most people, when they say "open standard", include "royalty-free" as part of their definition. In the case of Europe and South Africa (at least), that definition even has official sanction.
If "most people" use a term in a particular way - especially when that use is formally approved of by many governments - then that's what the term normally means. After all, that's how language works in general; the mapping of sounds to meanings is arbitrary, but we have to agree on the mapping to communicate in a particular language. It's understandable why some companies would like to redefine this term, or at least confuse its meaning. But we don't need to agree with them.
It's true that "GPL" is not the same as "open". But a good test for openness of a standard is "can you implement it using the GPL?". In short, if a standard CANNOT be implemented by GPL'ed software, then it CANNOT be an open standard. Why? That's because the GPL is by far the most popular open source software license; nothing else even comes close. And increasingly, major market niches have an open source software implementation as the #1 or #2 implementation. A standard that locks out major implementations cannot possibly be an open standard. The whole point of a software patent is the power to exclude implementation (without paying royalties, etc.), while the whole point of a standard is to allow arbitrary use - they are fundamentally incompatible. Digistan has a more reasonable definition of open standard - and why you would want one.
FTP is still fine for providing big files that don't need to be protected by a password. But yes, if you're CHANGING data, raw ftp is usually a bad idea.
If you're uploading files, I heartily recommend using rsync+ssh. It's incredibly fast, since only the files that CHANGED are uploaded, and ssh makes it all secure. It can be a pain to set up on some cheap hosting sites, but I've figured out how to make rsync+ssh work even on some cheap hosting sites. Hope that helps.
Mozilla certainly DOES care about end-users and developers. Unlike the others, they have NO reason to do anything OTHER than produce a high-quality browser. (They're not perfect, but at least they have every incentive to try.) The problem is that the U.S. patent system makes it illegal for community-developed software to implement patent-encumbered standards. Mozilla, etc., would be happy to include other codecs if it were legal for them to do so.
At this time, there's only one practical pair of open standards for video and audio: Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis. Other audio/video formats, like MP3 and H.*, are not open standards. It would cost almost NOTHING for Microsoft and Apple to implement the Ogg open standards; the only reason they don't include them is because (for various reasons) they explicitly do NOT want open standards to succeed. So the lines are pretty clear here: There's only one practical pair of open standards (Ogg Vorbis and Theora), open standards are good for end-users (eliminating control of others over their data), it's illegal for Mozilla etc. to include the other formats, and the other organizations are working hard to prevent adoption of open standards that would cost nearly nothing for them to implement.
There's a simple solution, anyway. Now that Firefox has Theora and Vorbis built-in, various OSS-friendly sites like Wikipedia should just switch and REQUIRE that to view audio/video, users MUST have support. Then users have a reason to demand support for unencumbered standards... or switch to browsers that implement the unencumbered standards. Codecs have a chicken-and-egg problem, but with enough material and enough users, they become a virtuous cycle. Eventually, the other browsers will need to implement open standards, or they will get killed by their competition. And once there's an open standard in place that is "good enough", it will get harder and harder (over time) to justify using the non-open formats.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Google to fund a drilling site near Redmond, Washington :-) ?