I should think most of the OSS community knows of Groklaw to some extent. But I wonder how much we really know about the achievements and character of the people behind it?

After coming across this interview with PJ today, and being a big fan, I thought it deserved a little more coverage. (Can somebody tell me why, the fact this is on ITPro, strikes me as a bit odd?)

IT PRO spoke to the site’s founder, Pamela Jones about the impact of the site, the SCO case and the role Groklaw has played in the ongoing legal case.

The SCO Group’s current fate can be neatly summarised by the title of PJ’s very first article on the case, back in May 2003 - “SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step.” In the intervening years PJ and Groklaw can be credited with unearthing and exposing many of the flaws in SCO’s case, most notably, obtaining and publishing the 1994 settlement in the USL vs BSDi case, which had been hidden from public view and played a significant role in undermining SCO’s claims to the ownership of Unix. Earlier this year PJ memorably compared SCO’s persistence in the face of the facts to the black knight in the Monty Python film who claimed “It’s only a flesh wound”.

It’s a great read, and Groklaw must be one of the few websites (it’s more than a blog) that really has, and continues to, “make a difference”. As for PJ and where she [and Groklaw] goes next, there was a fascinating conclusion:

As usual, I’m not doing a lot of planning. When I see an issue, we leap in, like the new litigation against Red Hat and Novell. We’re doing prior article searching, and so far, it’s looking very good. We did prior article searching on the NetApp v Sun litigation too. We’ll probably do more of that. And any lawyer who wants to pick the technically skilled Groklaw members’ brains is free to contact me.

We’ve had lawyers ask technical questions in preparation for depositions, for example. It’s a resource that is available.

“… it’s looking very good.”. Hmmm, I guess with the many thousands of eyes (both technical and legal) searching, keen to promote, protect and support the Open Source Community, it will only be a matter of time before someone stumbles over some prior art.

The power of many eyes versus many dollars…

After reading it, I was struck by some of the things PJ said and how, in the UK’s legal sense at least, Groklaw is basically providing a free service to Open Source just like our own Legal Aid system here. And, rather fascinatingly, is also using an Open Source, community & collaborative, based model to provide it. A lovely recursive theme there much loved by some of the older Open Source projects, e.g. GNU: Gnu’s Not Unix, Wine: Wine Is Not an Emulator, PHP: PHP Hypertext Processor.

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The Register has picked up news of yet another Microsoft Windows bug. The really scary thing about this one however is that it was originally recognised, and seemingly fixed, in 1999! According to the article this bug is apparently still real, and affects ALL versions of Windows. Including their very recent, and supposedly re-written from scratch, Vista line.

Microsoft bug squashers are investigating reports of a serious security vulnerability in Windows operating systems that could allow attackers to take control of vast numbers of machines, particularly those located off US shores.

…

Microsoft appears to have released a patch for the vulnerability in 1999. But the patch only protected domain names ending in .com, so WPAD servers using all other addresses have remained vulnerable.

That’s all right then. Although not if you are on a .co.uk or even perhaps a .gov.uk (oh no… NOT http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/ . Surely they wouldn’t be using Windows would they?) or any of the other TLDs out there that aren’t .com.

It makes me very glad to be Redmond Free…

I originally read about this story on Matt Assay’s blog.

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I have just read this article on the Register and it makes me proud to be British!

A patent for the handling of gratuities in card payments has been revoked by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) for being a business method implemented by a computer program. The decision follows recently-revised guidance on patentability.

One of the inventors told OUT-LAW today that his company spent more than £100,000 trying to enforce and defend the patent before passing the rights to another company, which he described as a “patent troll”. He believes that company will appeal this month’s ruling.

If you read the full story, there isn’t anything remotely “patentable” about this idea at all.

Their patent described a process of generating and handling an electronic online authorisation and uploading request relating to a payment transaction. The customer would be offered the chance to add a gratuity and a request for authorisation of the total would be constructed. A request would then be made over a telecoms network and a receipt generated for the customer.

Yes. That’s it. It’s an idea about how to charge for a tip and the main bill at the same time! Pretty new and innovative huh? Good grief… How on earth does anyone think this is patentable?

Patents are to protect INVENTIONS. That is new things, things that haven’t been thought of before or that are not just evolution to the status quo.

Over here we have some tests that a patent application must pass.

A landmark ruling in 2006 in the cases of Aerotel and Macrossan changed the way the UK-IPO assesses whether inventions are patentable. A new four-step test was introduced for the assessment of patentability:

1. Properly construe the claim;
2. Identify the actual contribution;
3. Ask whether it falls solely within the excluded matter;
4. Check whether the contribution is actually technical in nature.

Step 3 caused the patent to fall. The patent can cut fraud and enable gratuities to be paid by card at the same time as the principal sum; but the Hearing Officer wrote: “while they may be advantages of the invention, they are not achieved by technical means… They are achieved by changing the business process – i.e. changing the sequence of steps – in which the terminals are used. The claim is to how a business uses a known system.”

“The contribution falls squarely within the business method exclusion. It also falls within the computer program exclusion given its implementation by means of a computer program,” he concluded.

Ho hum. That sounds quite sensible to me. Although - as the title of this piece suggests - if you replace the K in UK with an S. Guess what? Yep. It’s protected by patent law.

There are some cracking comments on this post too. Well worth a read if you find the whole US/EU patent differences interesting. Especially when it comes to software and computing.

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I was just looking through some of this morning’s stats on visitors and I was quite amused by one of the google searches that led you here (I use characters from the Discworld novels as names for all the computers in our home. But I don’t quite get this… Is Rincewind a game or something?):

how to make rincewind work on windows vista

That made me think it would make an interesting post and perhaps one to revisit every so often…

can you make a living writing free /libre/open source software

Almost certainly. But I wonder who was asking about this?

getting my laser mouse to work

Must be the early mention of using my Logitech MX1000 on Ubuntu.

Here’s some I just don’t get or are rather surprised at. They must have been on the bottom of the Google rankings…:

cyclobenzaprine, process sourcerer, sun microsystems, gambling, ecomaction+download, red ball, release, new invention product that can not buy in market year 2007, websites [!!!!!]

I bet they got a surprise…

the laughing gnome, graphic design \”tim henderson\”,

LoL :-)

dolikeword95, funn with microsoft,

The most searched for terms that bring people here are rather surprisingly all about Compiz and Compiz Fusion. I haven’t analysed the data but at a guess I’d say about 70% of the searches to here are something to do with Compiz… Obviously there are LOADS of people interested in this…

That’s all for now. Interesting? Amusing?

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This is just great. It seems our friends in Brussels are at it again:

New antitrust investigation against Microsoft

…

The new case involves three main aspects. First, Microsoft allegedly barred providers of other text document formats access to information that would them allow to make their products fully compatible with computers running on Microsoft’s operating systems. “You may have experienced that sometimes open office documents can be received by Microsoft users, sometimes not.”

Second, for email and collaboration software Microsoft also may have privileged their own products like Outlook with regard to interfacing with Microsoft’s Exchange servers. The third, and according to Vinje, most relevant to the Internet and work done at the IGF, was the problem of growing .NET-dependency for web applications. .NET is Microsoft’s platform for web applications software development. “It is a sort of an effort to ‘proprietise’ the Internet,” said Vinje.

Finally someone is standing up to them. I guess this may well take some time to actually materialise as a case but something to watch for at least.

Ooooh, that makes me happy.

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I really can’t believe this story.

In a particularly pointless and shameless security “exercise” by yet another UK Government Quango (seemingly sponsored by Microsoft) they show how easy it is to hack into a PC running Windows XP service pack 1 with no firewall, filtering or other security techniques employed… Big deal…

A Microsoft executive calls the ease with which two British e-crime specialists managed to hack into a Windows XP computer as both “enlightening and frightening.”

Oh good grief…

Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft U.K., was surprised by the incident.

“In the demonstration we saw, it was both enlightening and frightening to witness the seeming ease of the attack on the (Windows) computer,” said McGrath. “But the computer was new, not updated, and not patched.”

McGrath also said that Service Pack 2 for XP had a firewall and that Vista was not as “accessible to the average hacker” due to “operating system components.”

What complete bollocks. I’m sorry but this smacks of using FUD to try and get naive and scared companies to migrate from XP. Why would they want to otherwise?

Just go and get Ubuntu. It works, is very secure and its FREE.

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Now the time is getting closer for the BRM, the noise level is starting to grow too! Lots of positioning, posturing, PR and lobbying is going to go on between now and next February.

This story caught my eye today:

PHILIPPINES–Microsoft and industry body Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) have teamed up to drive the adoption of Office Open XML in the Philippines.

According to Dave Walsh, Microsoft’s senior standard program manager, the Philippines was one of the countries which voted “no” on the use of OOXML.

“The country voted ‘no’ with clarifications. This means the panel voting on the standard still needs more information about Open XML,” Walsh said at the briefing last week.

Well now. Let’s have a look at this in a bit more detail… In the vote in September, the following countries (in that part of the world) voted with comments as follows:

Japan: 81, New Zealand: 54, Australia: 30, Korea: 25, Malaysia: 23, Philippines: 7, China: 1, Thailand: 1.

You can see the nature of the comments by the Philippines here, and, as a matter of fact, you can see the comments left by all of the voting members. www.dis29500.org is hosted by us as an Open endeavour to enable anyone to assist with the monumental task of identifying duplicates, comments that can be easily dealt with and comments of real substance that must be addressed.

But what about the two voting members who only made one comment? Here’s China’s

China National Body have been paid special attention to the ISO/IEC DIS 29500 ballot. Great work have been done and during the process we found it is a very complex technology which needs further more time to establish testing environment for thoroughly and deeply evaluation. We think the fast-track procedure is not suitable for this DIS.
We requested an extension to the ballot period for the DIS29500 for another 6 months in the letter to ISO/IEC JTC1 secretariat as well as ITTF. We still keep to our position that more time is necessary and essential to conduct a credible and responsible evaluation.

And here’s what Thailand though of ECMA-376

We disapprove the draft ISO/IEC 29500 for the reason that the time given by the fast-track processing is not enough for consideration of this important draft.

Ahhhh, now I can see why Microsoft are courting the Philippines. In the UK we like to call this “low hanging fruit”… But even here, their final comment is common with many others:

As well as other sub-sections within this level make references to proprietary applications whose behaviors are undefined in the standard. For example, autospaceLike Word95 specifies that implementations should autospace like Word95 but exactly how Word 95 autospaces is a Microsoft Company secret.

Precisely. How can something like “autospaceLikeWord95″ be in an ISO specification? Not very “OPEN” is it?

I wonder how Microsoft are helping CompTIA? Free Training perhaps, low cost licenses, gold-partner upgrades????

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Here’s a quick tip…

I was trying to get a Firefox session running over an SSH connection between my desktop PC (Ubuntu 7.10) and the little server I’m building. The strange thing was, every time I typed firefox & at the command line prompt, it started Firefox all right; but it started a local (Ubuntu) instance of it with my local profile settings! One of the reasons I wanted to run a remote browser was so I could download files directly to that machine and so I could access some html docs on that box; as it is now headless.

A bit of Googling led me here, where the author used this command ( export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1; firefox -profilemanager ) &. After a bit of experimentation, and more Googling, for my purposes it can be simplified to this:

firefox -no-remote &

This assumes Firefox version 2 and that your SSH connection was made using ssh -X uname@host

Hope this helps someone else. It got me foxed for ages initially…

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If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t, please go back to Part 1 and read from there. Alternatively if you click on the Untangle tag in the tag cloud then you should get all of the posts so far.

Hi all,

I’ve not yet got any further with the Untangle portion, but pretty much everything else is now in place and working

Last night I built and installed the few remaining applications that are necessary to support my objectives:

• MySQL (I need this for Joomla! and vtiger)
• Postgresql (I need this for untangle)
• Apache
• PHP (and some associated libraries for added functionality, i.e. HTML-Tidy, mm, libmcrypt, mhash…)

I have also been thinking about what it is actually I am trying to achieve. I find a picture really helps so here’s a block diagram of the applications I want and how they should interface to the outside world…

This was a good exercise that helped me to understand the flow of traffic and what needs to be prevented from passing through the server. The dotted line from Apache to the Internet is because I’m not sure yet whether I’ll actually provide any sort of public web presence from this box or not. I doubt it somehow but you never know…

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvements I’d be happy to hear them. I made the original diagram in OOo draw. Here’s the original file if you want to use it or alter it. As with all other stuff on here, its CC licensed.

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Remember all the débâcle about vote rigging, committee stuffing and other ever-so scandalous ongoings during Microsoft’s failed attempt to get their appallingly bad 6000+ page document specification passed through the ISO in September? No? Click here and start at the bottom…

Amongst many other national standards bodies, there were dubious voting patterns in Croatia. And Radoslav Dejanović

is still trying to enforce HZN (Croatian national standards body, or CSI) to disclose the information on members of their TC that voted unconditional yes for Microsoft OOXML. (more about that on Croatian blog Fuzzy on www.linux.hr)
It’s no more about OOXML. It’s about transparency, about my right to know who are the people that declare standards, and about my right to hold them responsible for their actions.

But without much success it seems. So far at least…

They’re stubborn. So am I. I have reached the point where the only sensible thing to do is to - sue them. Which is what I’m set up to. I have a law on my side, they have the bureaucracy on their. And a powerful ally that wouldn’t really want to have it’s proposed standard rejected.

Who’s going to win? I’m not sure. What I am about to do is to put up a good fight. Even if I lose, I might set the path for someone with more luck/persistence to carry on for the noble cause of government transparency.

Good luck Radoslav, may the community be with you…

Please send him a message of support. After all he only wants to find out the truth, what’s wrong with that? WHO could possibly be worried about the truth?

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