Top Tech Stories from Around the World Issue Number 1,774 Friday, 18 May 2012

10 Days Till Memorial Day

30 Days Till Father's Day

Our Daily Bit of the U. S. Constitution. Law Makers and Police, Ignore This Like Always

Amendment XIII

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Amendment XIV

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for t he choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

The Geico Channel

MP3

Lawmakers, Geico insurance is a bigger Ponzi scheme than Social Security. Friday, 18 May 2012

Broadband Boom: Changing Entertainment, Changing Behaviors

MP3

By Kurt Scherf
E-Commerce Times

Internet-connected devices like tablets and Smart TVs will continue to complement and replace some traditional methods of search, video-centric activities, and advertising. For example, 30 percent households with an Internet-connected device used it to rent at least one movie in the past month. Approximately 35 percent of mobile phone owners use their phones to look up listings while watching TV.

In the U.S. market, the percentage of broadband households owning and connecting at least one product besides PCs to the Internet has increased 45 percent between 2010 and 2011. Today, approximately 40 percent of all U.S. broadband households own at least one Internet-connected device, with game consoles accounting for 75 percent of these products. The increase in the adoption of these technologies offers manufacturers, pay-TV providers, advertisers and content owners new revenue and growth opportunities.

Even more important to recognize is the shift in consumer behaviors.

These devices will continue to complement and replace some traditional methods of search, video-centric activities and advertising.

For example, 30 percent households with an Internet-connected CE used the device to rent at least one movie in the past month. Approximately 35 percent of mobile phone owners use their phones to look up listings while watching TV.

Smart TVs are high-definition televisions with embedded technology that allows them to connect to online content sources.

Nearly 20 percent of U.S. broadband households own a smart TV. To date, a primary use of smart TVs has been to access movies and television shows from services such as Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Best Buy's (NYSE: BBY) CinemaNow. There are also a growing number of apps available for smart TVs.

Connected Blu-ray players offer consumers Internet connection features similar to those found on smart TVs but at a lower price. In addition to serving as an online content access portal, connected Blu-ray players will play a substantial role in helping consumers create digital locker versions of their existing collections of disc content.

Connected game consoles include current-generation game consoles such as Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii and Sony's (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation3. They have set an example for the entire consumer electronics industry about how the availability of premium content can develop into a service model. The console manufacturers successfully combined access to thousands of movies and television programs and original programming with gesture-based interaction and set-top box capabilities, and many consumer electronics manufacturers are now emulating this approach.
Digital video media receivers that can access online video and other content divide into two categories:

Products such as Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) TV and the Roku Video Player, which are intended to provide a premium video-on-demand service
Others that link to broader online video content, including user-generated and niche video sites such as Blip.tv, Break.com and Dailymotion, among others
The introduction of the new adapter boxes supporting Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) TV 2.0 has spurred developers of digital video media receivers to evolve their form factors, available content, and product usability.

Apple's iPad launch in April 2010 reinvigorated the media tablet CE category. While Microsoft, IBM (NYSE: IBM), Apple and others had launched tablets prior to the iPad, these products were generally conceived as computing products or message pads, and consumer uptake was dismal. The iPad found a much more enthusiastic market primarily due to two factors:

The iPad was designed for multimedia consumption rather than productivity
The consumer market had been primed by the success of smartphones and e-readers
Since 2010, two types of media companies have spearheaded TV and video content distribution on tablets. Over-the-top (OTT) media publishers and their distributors and multichannel TV service providers (i.e., cable MSOs and telcos) both view the tablets as a new channel for their video multiscreen strategies. In addition to its role as a TV Everywhere receiver, the media tablet is spurring growth in online video-on-demand such as downloadable movies.

New Considerations for Apps
Unlike the tablet and smartphone market, where Apple's competitors have primary used the Android operating system and applications platform, many variants exist in the connected consumer electronics market. There are opportunities for a variety of players. Factors that will differentiate connected CE operating systems and application platforms in the long term include the following:

How effectively they can grow their developer partners to bring applications to the market in an efficient manner. The way in which applications get accessed and used in the smart-TV environment will be similar to the smartphone and tablet market. That is, manufacturers don't really know how popular a particular application will be (i.e., "Angry Birds") until after it is launched. Apps platform developers need to lower the barrier of entry and time to market for apps developers by having an open software developer kit (SDK) offering and streamlining the process to make the app publicly available.
Seamless ties between smart TV apps and portable and mobile products such as tablets and smartphones. This factor won't be a requirement with every application, but there will be experiences that consumers will want to share across devices. Games tied to television programming are good examples, such as a "Dora the Explorer" treasure hunt game, promoted on the show and played on a tablet. Apps platform developers should look to develop ties to premium content owners to bring high-quality content, gaming, information and advertising across devices.
Convincing premium content owners that their content will be used to create additional value. Google's challenge to date has been that premium content providers don't trust it to share advertising revenues from their video fairly. At the same time, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) has been gaining content partners; most recently, it announced that ABC and Disney (NYSE: DIS) content will be accessible on its platform on select smart TV brands. Yahoo has been able to attract premium content owners by demonstrating solutions such as broadcast interactivity, where programming displayed on the television is synched to complementary content -- advertising, information, etc. -- either on an on-screen widget or a mobile device.

Implications for the Pay-TV Market
The connected CE market presents both a challenge and an opportunity for traditional pay-TV providers. These connected devices create for consumers retail-based alternatives to multichannel offerings, video-on-demand, and DVRs, but they are present pay-TV operators with the opportunity to extend TV Everywhere services. They benefit operators by reducing the number of set-top boxes needed per home and opening opportunities to deliver a more personalized video service, thus raising customer satisfaction.

Multiscreen and TV Everywhere services offer several business model options that service providers may employ:

Video subscriptions (either for free to current video subscribers or for a recurring fee)
Broadband subscriptions (either for free to current broadband subscribers or for a recurring fee)
Free for all online
Advertising

Second-Screen Interactivity and a Personalized Advertising Experience
Second-screen integration, which allows service providers to provide integrated ad campaigns across multiple screens, opens up a new path to reach and engage audiences anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Advertising on multiple screens expands the overall ad audience, allowing higher rates due to the larger number of eyeballs watching each advertisement and the higher level of interactivity. The ability to measure the impact of advertising across different devices will lead to a more personalized and targeted advertising experience.

Two-screen synergies are important to advanced TV and connected TV development because they can turn TV from a passive experience into an engaging one. Major advertisers and content owners are focusing on automatic content recognition solutions that will populate the smartphone or tablet with information and advertising complementary to the programming viewed on the television. This development will be a significant step forward in providing more personalized advertising environments.

Approximately 30 percent of U.S. mobile phone users and 40 percent of tablet owners use their device to look up info about the program they are watching or products and services they have seen advertised.

User Interfaces
The popularity of Kinect and Siri has spurred CE manufacturers to integrate these new control technologies. Even in this early stage, over 50 percent of U.S. users of Apple iPhone 4S are very satisfied with the Siri voice-command feature, with an additional 21 percent satisfied.

In addition, nearly 40 percent of iPhone 4S owners now want similar voice features for their TVs, indicating these solutions can have crossover appeal among different platforms, from smart TVs to gaming.

At CES, LG Electronics demonstrated a downloadable game (in this case, "Fruit Ninja") in a 3D format played without a controller. This kind of simple and fun interaction with the smart TV encourages more living room-centric gaming, and also generates interest in 3D content, which to date has been sorely lacking.

Parks Associates' "Value of Video: Shifting Consumer Dollars" reveals that only 6 percent of U.S. households own a 3D TV, and purchase intentions are far greater for a smart TV than one with 3D capabilities (by a factor of five times). However, with the introduction of passive 3D glasses that do not require batteries and charging, and are less expensive than the active-shutter glasses so highly prevalent with previous 3D TV models, 3D televisions should sell in greater numbers over the next few years.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Current Activity Reported by the US-CERT

MP3

Apple Releases QuickTime 7.7.2

Apple has released QuickTime 7.7.2 to address multiple vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial-of-service condition.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review Apple Support Article HT5261 and apply any necessary updates to help mitigate the risk.

Daily Installment of Coffee Joe, By Jim O'Connor

MP3

We spent weeks going over his routine. Everything from the time he woke up, to the time he went to sleep. I guess Bob really didn't have too many strange habits or anything like that. After I got all of the information, it would be easy to build the history file.

We were finally ready. Everything was in place. First was the release order. This would no doubt be checked out, but by the time it was, he would already be out of jail, and the records would be destroyed.

I had put the name Humphrey Bogart into a file that I wanted to be called up by the government folks who do mass file destruction. Just for that added touch, I created a video image with him smoking a cigarette. I knew this would have to be taken to an FCC official who would then run his destruction program.

It was about noon when Verizon did their download. The schedule was in place. The first thing to do would be to get to Folsom Prison by five. That is the time the release order would say to release him. Then at five thirty the guard post would be rotated throughout the prison. At six, the Humphrey Bogart file would be created. Then when Verizon destroyed it, I would also destroy all records concerning the conviction and arrest.

I thought it was great to have the government working for me again.

We arrived at Folsom at about four forty five. We asked the man at the gate which way to go to pick up someone being released. He directed us to the release point.

Sure enough, right at five this guy comes walking out. He really didn't look like he had such a bad time, but did look very confused. I was a little worried, because we weren't able to get word to him about what was going to happen. As he was leaving the last locked gate I could here one of the prison officials say, "On behalf of the State, thank you for your assistance." he was about ready to say something, but then he looked at Ahsu, and she was moving her eyes back and forth. He then just smiled and proceeded toward us.

He walked over; Kissed Ahsu then asked, "Who's this?" She told him that I was a good friend but that she would explain more later. He stuck out his hand and said "My name's Bob. How do you do?" I told him my name, we shook hands, and then we started back for the main gate.

The Verizon Channel

MP3

russell cellular verizon virus, in Gainesville, Texas, as long as you are going to treat your customers like common criminals I am going to act like one. Anything goes. Legal or not! Friday, 18 May 2012

Do Not Shop in Gainesville

MP3

Wednesday, 16 May 2012.

We are calling for a total boycott of Crook County.

Sorry Walmart, Scullys, Home Depot, Exxon, we are boycotting Crook County until the Gainesville Police restore basic constitutional civil liberties.

Do not shop in Gainesville or the rest of Crook County. No shopping, no taxes.

I suggest nobody spend money anywhere in Crook County to avoid paying the taxes that are paying for the nazi cops.

Told by Nazi Officer Green, Gainesville Police to turn off the van speakers in front of my house, I was listening to the Crook channel.

That does answer my question were in Crook county we have freedom of speech without pissing you guys off. Nowhere.

Hail Hitler you control freak Green

I guess freedom of speech is dead. Janet Reno would be so proud.

This just happened about 6 pm.

Tuesday, 15 May 2012.

Back in my Air Force days, I would never warn other drivers about cops on base. Air Force cops were true law-enforcement. They would never setup speed traps for revenue collection. In fact they did setup all kinds of interesting traps. A typical punishment for speeding might be, first time a letter of counseling from your supervisor, the second time would be a letter of reprimand from your commander, next time, you might get band from driving on base.

I do not want to give away any Air Force secrets, but the cops on an Air Force Base are always polite to everyone and very professional. If they stopped you, they usually had a good reason to. They never stop you just because they can.

We added Crook county to our DJ MP3 software, it is listed as:
avoid Gainesville, like the plague, because they have the most corrupt Police department in the world.
at
http://companyaa.com/item0000005/a.asx.

Not to worry folks, we are not going to let Crooks, I mean Cops take away from our productivity.

The Great Software Giveaway continues.

Thursday, 29 March 2012

This afternoon I was at the rest stop on I 35, I was handing out the two pages of this sites telling people to �avoid Gainesville, like the plague, because they have the most corrupt Police department in the world.� About ten minutes after I got there, two Gainesville cops came over to me and asked, are you Jim O'Connor? I said yes has I hand them each a printout. They then told me to leave now. He told me the rest stop is not a public place, and I have two minutes to leave or go to jail. He also told me if I ever show up at the rest stop again, I will go to jail.

Those Officers merely proved my point in front of a lot of people.

You pretty much have me under house arrest, where can I go that will not piss you guys off?

You guys at the Gainesville Police Department should pay for complete physical exam with the doctor of my choice, outside Crook County. Your Officer broke my skin with excessive force with the handcuffs. Your control freak tighten cuffs that tight to cause maximum pain, and to let me know that he was in control of my life, not me. That nut is probably infected us with blood born diseases, even AIDS.

What's Next After Gpl and Apache?

MP3

The trend for commercial open source licensing could be back toward the center, either to MPLv2 or an even better successor

Simon Phipps | InfoWorld

At the end of April, I wrote about the idea that usage of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is declining and concluded that although new, commercially initiated open source projects were indeed tending to adopt other licenses, the use of the GPL itself is still growing -- especially among projects in its core community of GNU platform development. This article explores why commercial projects pick particular open source licenses and what might happen in the future.

Dual licensing
First, a brief historical recap: During the "open source bubble" of the mid-2000s, driven to build Web-facing solutions on short timescales, many companies used a combination of Linux/Apache HTTPD/MySQL/Perl to prototype and iterate. They were able to do this because open source specifically grants the freedom to use those packages for any purpose -- to study them, modify them, and deploy them -- all without permission from any entity.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Blogger Simon Phipps expounds on the inherent evil of software patents. | Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Technology: Open Source newsletter. ]

The software that resulted worked really well, but when it came time to move to production, most companies asked for legal advice. As always happens when you ask your lawyer for business advice (instead of making business decisions and asking your lawyer to help you achieve them legally), they were told to play safe and buy a proprietary license to MySQL and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Despite open source licenses offering everyone the freedom to use the software for any purpose, many companies were concerned that the GPL might force them to open up all their internal workings to the world.

A number of software entrepreneurs chose to base their business models on this fear. They selected the GPL for their software projects, not to promote some vision of digital liberty, but rather to exploit the fears of corporate legal advisers about the GPL. Called the dual-license model (referring to the software being available under both an open source license and a proprietary license), it depends on the software developer owning all the copyrights so that they can provide different license terms for paying and nonpaying users, and on the use of the most scary open source license possible in the eyes of inexperienced legal advisers. Today this means use of the AGPL, a variant of the GPL that is also triggered by Web deployment, unlike the GPL itself.

All the same, this approach is in decline. Corporate decision-makers have become more experienced, and their legal advisers have gained greater insight into the GPL. Purchasing decisions have come to revolve much more around the purchase of necessary services related to the software, and the GPL no longer shoos-in the business. Just selling services on open source software is not "sticky" and lacks lock-in -- the four software freedoms ensure that anyone can complete on service value.

Open core as a business model
As the scare value of the GPL declined, some business ventures switched to another approach. They tended to retain the GPL for the core project, hoping still to scare up a little revenue. However, more and more of them added proprietary layers on top, becoming little better than the proprietary vendors they claimed to replace. By making the features essential to enterprise deployment proprietary, they hoped to force adopters into their revenue funnel.

Moreover, since the proprietary software couldn't be used by the community, they faced no direct competition from community members offering better value points to their customers. The combination of enterprise compulsion and lock-in was very attractive, and many projects in the late years of the decade moved to this "open core" approach.

For the customer, the problem is that instead of delivering and cultivating software freedom, the open-core business model induces dependency on closed software and lock-in to a vendor. Open-core businesses hope you'll be willing to trade your freedom for tangible short-term benefits or even just for "shiny."

They stand to benefit massively from having you locked in; they want to trade your freedom for their profit. While open-core businesses truthfully say they are sustaining open source core software, their actual business has nothing to do with open source. It�s a bait-and-switch, wrapping the same old lock-in under the flag of open source and hoping you won't notice.

This is not just a philosophical game. "Software freedom" may sound abstract, but it is the system of thinking behind the very practical and tangible benefits that have drawn vast numbers of businesses to use open source. As I've written previously, the four freedoms (to use, study, modify and distribute the software without restriction) have created a vast market by enabling cost-savings and flexibility. A business model that cultivates a casual disregard for those liberties while pretending otherwise deserves to be challenged -- and it was.

Deployability as differentiation
There are still plenty of those businesses around, many doing well. But the trend my previous article explored has steadily subsided as complex enterprise infrastructure has become easier and easier to obtain and deploy. The existence of substantial, mission-ready open source software has left fewer and fewer niches for software companies to differentiate on software alone. In an interesting, baseball-themed post, RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady says:

The technology industry is a lot like major league baseball circa 2000: it shares widely held, but fundamentally incorrect, ideas about valuation. Vendors and buyers alike, for example, behave as if software were a competitive advantage, when this is only rarely the case.
The result has been the rise of deployability as differentiation. Companies differentiate by the way they assemble the common open source components everyone uses and on the service they are consequently able to offer. For example, while theoretically anyone could build a cloud-based continuous integration service using Jenkins and a stack of open source software underneath it, CloudBees has been able to successfully trade on the know-how involved in deploying and scaling such a service.

In a world where the software itself is nondifferentiating, it becomes smarter and smarter for vendors to exploit a much-mentioned attribute of open source software: community. The rising trend of the moment is typified by projects from Eclipse to LibreOffice. Although they follow a path that was paved over a decade ago by the Apache Software Foundation, these projects combine the unblinking transparency that Apache brings with a focus on a particular software set, allowing more focused engagement with both developers and corporations. As Mike Milinkovic of Eclipse once said, "The Eclipse community is working on a single technology platform, so every Eclipse project can interoperate with the others at some level."

Interestingly, neither of the two projects I've named use the Apache License for their code. Eclipse uses the Eclipse Public License and LibreOffice uses LGPLv3 -- both weak copyleft licenses. Using a weak copyleft license has been optimal because, while it offers the freedom to use the software in combination with other software in any way that is interesting, the project itself remains a code base with an explicit requirement to work in-community and contribute. While for the most part that requirement needs no enforcement, its absence allows well-resourced and politically adept corporations to "game" open source, using both dominant contribution and behind-the-scenes agreements to ensure that the public project is effectively under their control. That sort of high-stakes politics is not desirable.

Peering into the future
While the newest open source projects such as OpenStack and OpenShift have chosen to use the Apache License, a non-copyleft or "permissive" open source license with good patent protections, I believe in time we will see the licensing trend for new open source projects targeted at commercial collaboration swing back to the center, away from either the GPL or Apache extremities. Until recently, none of the mainstream "center ground" open source licenses has been optimal. These are the Mozilla Public License (MPL -- and its many "vanity name" variants), the Eclipse license, the CDDL (used widely by projects influenced by Sun Microsystems), and of course, the LGPL.

Recently, a new approach has emerged. After a decade of use, the Mozilla Foundation recently updated the MPL to a new version, MPLv2. It delivers the same high degree of patent safety we've come to expect, is a file-based weak-copyleft license that avoids causing license relationship issues in combination with other software, and has been well-drafted to be readable and relatively short. Most important, it is explicitly compatible with the GPL, allowing MPLv2 projects to play nicely both with Apache- and GPL-licensed software. It occupies a sweet spot: permissive enough for corporations, copyleft enough for communities, and well-written to boot.

I believe we will see future collaborations use the new version 2 of the Mozilla Public License more and more. We may even see some projects already using weak-copyleft licenses migrate to it -- indeed, the Document Foundation, home to LibreOffice, has been discussing the possibility of such a move for LibreOffice. As the timeline for commercial open source licensing progresses, I believe a trend back toward the center will arise, either to the MPLv2 itself or to an even better successor. That's a positive and unifying direction, and I sincerely hope it happens.

This article, "What's next after GPL and Apache?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

And Now, a Word from Our Sponsor

MP3

The Great Software Give Away Continues at TechJim Software in Gainesville, Texas.