HackNBlog @ Salamanteri Server

I believe most here have already read about Google starting up an operating system of their own, Chrome OS to compete with Windows as their next project. I’ll share some of my feelings about good, bad and the futile related to this hopefully neat project.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Google want’s to provide users with an OS that boots up lightning fast and ready for web in seconds from switching power on. They want the system not to clutter up but always run as fast as anew. They want to provide an OS where there is no fuss and fighting with new hardware, configuring the system (that usually needs knowledge below the average) and no updates that break things or change&confuse the user interface. This all sounds good - and it also already sound familiar.

Gathered not from Chrome OS official blog but from a zdnet blog entry, let’s check some known facts:

• It runs on top of Linux kernel.
• It will boot directly into the Chrome Web browser
• It will be aimed primarily at netbooks
• It will run on both x86 and ARM processors
• It will not be designed to have local storage; all data will be stored in the cloud
• Google will not entice developers to build software to run on the Chrome OS; instead, they want them to build Web apps that will run on any standards-based browser
• The three most important features will be “speed, simplicity and security”, according to Google
• Google will release the software to the open source community before the end of 2009
• Announced Chrome OS hardware partners: Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.
• Netbooks running Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010

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Ok, I dont know how long (actually only 2 days according to stats) this site was down. The reasons:

1. I don’t live alone and sometimes my roommate likes to take pills. I got nothing against that, but then he comes to my room, brings some of his stuff here and takes some of mine away… Actioning irrationally he sometimes does other things too - this time he plugged off the power from my switch where my server is linked into. So that caused first problem.
2. My friend restarted computer. Before I had my httpd start automatically at boot but now that it also keeps https server it asks password when starting… Obviously it thus has to be hand started by me right after booting (there was, btw, no need for reboot anyway, that was all my friends stupidity).

Well, I just restarted apache and everything should be working fine again…

I recently bumped into an article about conference where the issue of software patent laws needing a reform was discussed. I will list Couple things to highlight I picke out of the text here. First:

A couple of scholars noted that large software firms, among others, publicly opposed software patents in the 1980s.

The most important and interesting part is about innovation. As you all know, or should know, the patent laws were designed to promote innovation, especially so that small people could publish their inventions without the fear of big ones coming to steal their idea and get all the money. Heres the piece I find “The Important” one when it comes to software patents:

Some of the harm from software patents is obvious. Do they provide any compensating benefit? There was little, if any, evidence that they encourage innovation. Although the number of software patents has exploded in recent years, one panelist expressed doubt that success in the technology area was associated with patent ownership. He observed that had the young Bill Gates been confronted at the outset with the litigation risks of tens of thousands of software patents, he might have chosen to exercise his entrepreneurial skills in a field other than software. The point, of course, is that the current system to some extent discourages innovation and entrepreneurship – a travesty of its intended purpose.

At a minimum, history suggests that patents are not a significant incentive to innovation in the software field. As I pointed out in my remarks at the conference, the Federal Circuit case law finding software to be patentable mostly dates from the mid-1990s, and the software patent explosion has occurred in the last ten years or so. However, a great deal of software now in everyday use was created earlier. Free and open source software programs such as GNU Emacs, GCC, and Linux date from the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the most widely used proprietary software programs, like Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft Word, and Oracle were released in the early 1980s. There’s no reason to think that the developers of those and other successful software programs would have been more innovative if they could have obtained patents.

So he patent system does not work when it comes to software patents. In fact it is, at worst, a huge danger to future innovations in software. Software patent system is wrong and again the FOSS ideology comes from quite the opposite camp than big companies which now support software patent system:

It is theoretically possible that some software developers today are motivated by the hope of a new patent, but the likelier impact of our current patent system is to distract developers with anxieties about being sued over preexisting patents. We know beyond question that the the incentives of the patent system are not encouraging free and open source software developers. A patent entitles the holder to exclude others from making, using, and selling an invention. FOSS developers don’t want to exclude others this way – they want to share their code – and so FOSS developers in principle have no interest in obtaining patents.

My suggestion: The patent system should be completely ditched when it comes to abstract software.

To read the original article, browse at article Brookings Conference on Software and Business Method Patents Highlights Need for Reform on red hat press site.

Note! This post discusses a lot about program here and often elsewhere called “SecureROM” - apparently the correct name would be SecuROM

Something interesting I bumped into… There is a good bunch of examples of why DRM protection of software (usually games) is a bad idea. Most notable reasons being as simple as following: While DRM protection has not prevented a single game from becoming available as pirate copy with protection being removed, for those willing to buy the game the copy protection does instead create problems ranging from minor annoying to outrageous problems concerning functionality of the whole operating system. This alone should be reason enough to abandon DRM technologies but still several companies don’t seem to understand this… Today I bumped into good example of how trying to use DRM as futile attempt to prevent a game from being pirated can also be a massive failure creating a huge loss in game sales and resulting to 100% opposite effect than what was hoped. Electronic Arts has been using a DRM system named “SecureROM” on some of their games, including their hit game “Spore” which has resulted in huge losses for the company itself. This protection software can rightfully be considered as highly harmful malware. Some of the things the user should know of what happens when you install Spore obtained from legitimate source and thus requiring SecureROM:

• SecureROM is cant be uninstalled by uninstalling Spore, nor with uninstaller of it’s own. The user has to do certain special steps to get rid of it.
• SecureROM constantly monitors usage of the system and thus creates possible and severe security risks, uses system resources (CPU and memory) all the time and thus generally lowers usability and security of the system.
• Cripples functionality of the whole operating system. According to several users this malware has, for example, prevented the OS from recognizing some hardware changes like installing a new dvd-drive. Some users have also reported not being able to burn any data on DVD’s. In some cases apparently the whole OS has stopped to function after CPU or motherboard change (or other large changes in hardware) when SecureROM is installed.
• and more…

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Ok, before you get mad about the post title, do read the two lines below:

• I am really, really, really (get it?) happy that Obama was chosen over that loser republican
• This post is my first and most likely the last one about these US precidential elections - I write it because here in europe we think so high and mighty about being better than americans. Naturally we mostly are (could not resist) but when it comes to racism, here is what I want to talk about:

There are very few countries in europe where it would be possible today for a black man to be elected as a president. We dont like to admit it, but that’s the way it is. Still rather than admitting it we pretend to be amazed that it did happen in USA. Sure, I am amazed of that, but I would be even more amazed if a black man was chosen as president of Finland.

We have way too much (and so does most other countries, including USA, but hey - they did choose black man) racism and too many racist idiots spreading around their ideologies and TOO LITTLE ACTIVITY AGAINST RACISM! The point is not that every country should have black president, that would be just silly :D The point is that it should not matter whetever you are black, white or fucking neon-blue when running for president (or for burger flipping) but what can you do.

And today on this area, sorry my european brothers, we are not doing better than americans. And the fact that what just happened there is NOT the only example.
And to my mates in USA: Dont get proud of this, your not doing too great either. We all have to do even better. Let’s not forget that.

This is a white pale-ass from Finland speaking. Over and out.

No, I’m not using Windows on my own computer but at work I’m facing this issue right now:

Drive letter C: was very low on space and I noticed that there was a huge swap set in there while on D: there was plenty of more room. So I decided to disable swap on C: and enable swap on D: and let the system decide the swap size. It was not that big of a surprise that Windows was not capable to enable these changes without rebooting - after all, it’s still lousy system on updating it’s settings on fly.

What bugs the damn out of me that it did not give me the regular “reboot now?” window that I could just dismiss but a one with a moving bar - and it would have automatically rebooted after the bar had gone full if I had not pressed “reboot later” button.
Now I dont know what kind of stupid idiot monkey came up with the idea of serving the user with automagical reboot so that he don’t have to bother himself about it but rather be glad after coming from cup of coffee and having suddenly lost all the open programs and unsaved work there was still at the moment!!

It does not end here! The stupid monkey decided that it would be nice to repeat the popup after a while… Supposedly in case that the user would have gone to have a cup of coffee and the system could sneak itself to reboot without the user having a chance to tell it not to! It’s not that there is any critical reason to hurry the reboot - the system keeps working with the old setting until I (or windows) decides to reboot but apparently someone thought that this would really be a great feature giving a fullfilling user-experience (oh, it certainly would if it rebooted while I was having coffee).

…and people say that windows does not suck? Come now, a real system does not need a reboot to change swap settings around as much as you might want, let alone go clowning around this way. Microsoft, WTF!?

Thank god we dont have software patents here in Finland and hopefully we will never have. Hopefully…
Here’s a quote that I read on one blog:

Patent: Application-Specific Windows Colourisation
posted by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Sep 2008 23:23 UTC
IconThe US patent might be a bit daft, especially when it comes to software, but it does offer some interesting insights into what crazy things the big companies might be working on for future products. One such patent emerged today: Microsoft applied in 2005 (and was granted in 2008) a patent which describes how different windows may be coloured differently, or that they may have different transparency settings. This sounds a bit weird, but it may actually prove to be quite useful.

I wonder how is it possible that this feature in fact already DOES EXIST on at least one but propably in several window managers and desktop environments under *nix systems. In America you can get these silly patents called “software patents” that have very different purpose from the original idea of patents (which I then again do support) - but not only that: you can also get a patent for something that SOMEONE ELSE developed, released and has been around for years.

I don’t care - if any b-shit company ever comes to tell me that I break their patent to “creating shell scripts running under unix or unix-resembling systems” or something equally silly (and the fact is, many s-patents are way more ridiculous) I will tell them to stick their patents where the sun don’t shine - so that I wont have to.

Me is angry!

I feel mad! I feel mad because of legal issues on playing DVDs on Linux with open source software. Issues that are really based on nonsense, misclaims and misunderstandings that I’ll try to address along this rant.

But first: I made a page with guides on how to install different players on different linux distributions. Only two now but you can help by writing more instructions. So please check out Full DVD support on Linux guide.

I decided to write this after Finnish Court of Appeal overturned earlyel court decision making it basically illegal to view DVDs on Linux. The basis on this is total nonsense but there are similiar problems on some other countries too. Let me explain why it is wrong, does not make sense and why (in my opinion) nobody should care about the software beeing “illegal” when concidering using linux system to view DVD’s.
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Ok, once again I got pissed off by corporate fuckheads… Check this news article out:
Sony BMG’s chief anti-piracy lawyer: “Copying music you own is stealing”

…those greedy bastards wont be satisfied by defining every kid who copies a song or two from a friend a thief - no, the new definition by Jennifer Pariser, “the head of litigation for Sony BMG” is that “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,”.

So now they are claiming that when you buy a CD, you can’t copy a song from the CD to your MP3 player - if you want to listen a song on your home stereos and in your MP3 player you would have to buy two separate copies of the same song! Of course while making a backups of data you have on your computer you should make sure that you wont make backup copies of the songs you have purchased in MP3 format - in this twats dreams that is!
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