Sick Idea: Using Patents to Kill People

How, er, sick is this?

Of all the exclusions from patentability, most poignant is the bar on patenting methods of surgery, therapy or diagnosis practised on the human or animal body. While it seeks to release medical practitioners from the shackles of commercial monopoly and legal liability when choosing how best to treat their patients, many argue that its true effect is to stifle the creation, publication and promulgation of new techniques that save lives or improve their quality.

Poignant? It's basic human decency. Imagine being unable to use a life-saving technique on a patient simply because it was "patented", and the licensing fees were exorbitant. Imagine, indeed, the situation in developing countries that can't even afford medical equipment, much less absurd, intellectual monopolies.

There's a reason we don't have patents on such things: they represent basic human knowledge of the kind whose invention and transmission down the generations lies at the heart of our civilisation and humanity. The day we start charging for this kind of thing is the day we as a race are in deep, deep trouble.

John Pugh, MP, Rides to the Rescue

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Enterprise Interview: Ismael Ghalimi

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Amazon Getting Greedy?

I'm a big fan of Amazon - actually, make that a big addict. But when it starts throwing its weight around, I can't help thinking it is starting to act like a certain other large company that wants it all:

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

"POD" is Print on Demand, an exciting and increasingly popular way to publish books, especially those with small runs (most of them); Lightning Source is a big POD publisher, while BookSurge is Amazon's rival version.

Come on, Amazon, you don't need to do this: you can become the central point where people buy books, without insisting you print the bloody things too....

Mapping the Power of People

Leaving aside Terminal 5's little teething problems today, and independently of the fact that the only way they will get my fingerprints is if they cut my fingers off, here's a heart-warming tale of how the people beat The Man/Men when it comes to providing up-to-the-minute maps:

Heathrow’s terminal 5 is a major high profile new development. On it’s own it is bigger than any other airport in Europe except Frankfurt. It will generate, from today, more car journeys than a decent sized town. Yet most of the on-line mapping sites don’t seem to be capable of having a decent map ready on the day that it opens.

It’s examples like this that demonstrate how well OpenStreetMap can produce accurate and timely maps. Further vindication of the effectiveness of the OpenStreetMap approach.

(Via James Tyrrell.)

OOXML and Porn: What's the Connection?

Talking of Document Freedom Day, here's an amusing - and symptomatic - story:

anonymous supporters of OOXML use Domains by Proxy registar in order to register a site with a very similar address of Document Freedom Day's. The OOXML support site is Document Freedom Day **dot com** and redirects to a well known astroturf site which pretends to be a community of OOXML supporters.

This technique is a redirection scam which, according to the explanation given by the Online Internet Institute, takes place

* when you go to one URL and are automatically transferred to another URL. It further explains that it
* doesn't always send you to a porn or gambling site and that
* it could be a scam to lure you to places you had never intended to go.

Which is clearly the case here: to confuse users who expect to check out the Document Freedom Day event page, and lure them into their own OOXML astroturf site.

BSI to Celebrate Document Freedom Day with Chains

On Open Enterprise blog.

Eee PC SDK

I don't normally blog about heavy developer issues, because that's not the focus here. But I think this news is important:

Asus has launched a software developer kit or SDK for the Eee PC. Let's ignore the fact that the Eee PC uses open source software, so you shouldn't really need an SDK to develop applications and just focus on the fact that this kit includes tools and instructions for writing applications that can be easily added to the Eee PC's easy mode interface.

...


the SDK includes the following components:

* Xandros Desktop Open Circulation Version 4.5
* QT
* Eclipse
* QT plugin for Eclipse
* Debian packaging wizard developed by Xandros

The user guide also includes detailed instructions for creating applications and icons that will work in the Eee PC's Easy Mode interface.

Against the slightly worrying background of increased focus by Asus on Windows XP for the Eee PC, I think (hope) this confirms that the company remains committed to the original platform.

The Future of Open Source: Another View

On Open Enterprise blog.

Free Our Bills

One of the great unsung heroes of British democracy (such as we have left) is MySociety, which provides indispensable free services like TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. These have transformed the way I interact with my local MP.

And now they have a new wheeze: Free Our Bills:

Writing, discussing and voting on bills is what we employ our MPs to do. If enough MPs vote on bills they become the law, meaning you or I can get locked up if they pass a bad one.

Bills are, like, so much more important than what MPs spend on furniture.

The problem is that the way in which Bills are put out is completely incompatible with the Internet era, so nobody out there ever knows what the heck people are actually voting for or against. We need to free our Bills in order for most people to be able to understand what matters about them.

As they say:

This campaign can only succeed if normal internet users like you lend a hand. Please sign up and we'll send you easy tasks (like emailing your MP, or coming up with some ideas). Together we can improve Parliament!

So please do (well, if you're a Brit, anyway.) (Via Amused Cynicism.)

Gobsmacked by Microsoft

I wrote before about Microsoft's attempts to "encourage" India to vote in favour of OOXML. That gambit failed, and what do we find?

At the meeting held on 20th March 2008, we were informed that Microsoft has complained to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and to the apex office of the country about the constitution of the committee and also cast aspersions on the impartiality of the chairperson of LITD15, Mrs. Neeta Verma. The chairperson was furious and offered to step down from her post. She pointed out that the committee has met numerous times and Microsoft never brought this issue up in front of the committee nor did they check the facts with her or her organization before complaining to the apex office.

Are there no limits?

Happy Document Freedom Day

Today is Document Freedom Day. So, why should we care?

In a world where records are increasingly kept in electronic form, Open Standards are crucial for valuable information to outlive the application in which it was initially generated. The question of Document Freedom has severe repercussions for freedom of choice, competition, markets and the sovereignty of countries and their governments.

In other words, document freedom is about your freedom: if your documents are in chains, so are you.

Open Source: All You Need is Love (Mostly)

On Open Enterprise blog.

How Sad is That, Microsoft?

According to a report published on Thursday by technology newswire Tectonic, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the minister of public service and administration, told the Idlelo conference in Dakar, Senegal, that free software and open standards were intended to encourage competition, while patents were exclusive and anti-competitive by their nature.

"Whereas there are some industries where the temporary monopoly granted by a patent may be justified … there's no reason to believe that society benefits from such monopolies being granted for computer programs [and inventions]," she said in a pre-recorded speech delivered at the conference.

Right on, sister - glad to see that intellectual monopoly meme. But, wait, what do we have here? Why, Microsoft's response to this idea, exposing its very own Weltanschauung:

But Paulo Ferreira, the platform strategy manager at Microsoft South Africa, said: "There is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity."

He added: "For innovation to continue, there needs to be value - and even open-source applications have some form of market model, which incentivises them to continue innovating."

So there we have it: Microsoft's world, there is no such thing as disinterested generosity, no such thing as altruism. Which means, of course, that Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Tim Berners-Lee - to name but a few of those so-called "altruists" - are, in Microsoft's opinion, nothing but liars or utterly self-deluded....

What a sad, cold, lonely little circle of hell Microsoft inhabits.

Understanding Standards

On Open Enterprise blog.

Open Source Social Networks Are Like Buses....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Something in the Air

For those readers (assuming I still have any) who wonder why I witter on about topics that seem distant from that exciting free software stuff, here's someone else doing it. Andy Updegrove is the best writer about standards, bar none. He's particularly sharp on the subtleties of the ODF vs OOXML ding-dong. But here he's on about something else:

Our modern shelters, it seems, are becoming more seductive than ever. Not only are on-line and other electronic entertainments negatively impacting television and print journalism, but use of public parks in the US is falling off as well, even as population continues to rise. Apparently, our affinity for the out of doors is fighting a losing battle against the delights of our electronically-enabled cocoons.

It strikes me that this is an especially inauspicious time for mankind to become less connected to the natural world. That world is increasingly under attack – by us. The more insulated we are from it, the more abstract that impact will seem. Already we know that the opportunity to brake global warming before it has catastrophic effects is rapidly slipping away. And yet we know that we are doing too little to avoid such consequences.

What we do to the earth will certainly have profound effects on humanity. But the earth is ancient and patient, and able to recover in the fullness of time – without us - from the worst that we can inflict upon it. What would be at most a slight fever for Gaia would be at best disastrous, and at worst fatal for modern civilization. There is no doubt who the winner and loser in this conflict will be.

It’s easy to think such thoughts, gazing at the stars on a windy night in the high desert. Perhaps the earth does us a favor when it holds us in the unseen grip of the wind, reminding us of our proper place in the natural order of things.

What's interesting about this for me - aside from the fact that it's beatifully written - is that it is cognate to my tangential stuff. Coincidence? I don't think so.

A Splittist War of Words

As I've noted before, the Chinese position on the events in Tibet is seriously undermined by the fact that it won't allow observers in to see for themselves. If it were confident of its position, it would welcome such reporting.

Instead, we have reporting in the West that is seriously hampered, and thus inevitably inaccurate at times, simply because of those difficulties. Meanwhile, the Chinese news agencies are putting out rather different versions. Take the following, for example:

"Many reports were not accurate," said Tony Gleason, field director of Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund, an American organization which helps poor Tibetans through skill training and small sum of financing.

OK, that sounds interesting: a Western eye-witness. So let's hear what he has to say:

"I never saw police open fire to the mobsters," he added.

Er, come again?

"Open fire to"? Sorry, me old china, that ain't English. And "mobsters"??? Nobody uses the word "mobsters" these days. In fact "mobsters" clearly belongs to that select vocabulary that includes "capitalist roaders" and "splittists" that no native English speaker would be caught putting their chops around.

Bit of a giveaway, that....

Update: Interesting development, here: I wonder what it means....

Tibet, Cyberattacks and Open Source

There's nothing like a mature response to criticism, and this is nothing like a mature response:

Human rights and pro-democracy groups sympathetic to anti-China demonstrators in Tibet are being targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks designed to disrupt their work and steal information on their members and activities.

But what really caught my attention was the following:

Van Horenbeeck said the danger with the e-mail viruses involved in the attacks is that they are so hand-crafted and new that they usually go undetected by dozens of commercial anti-virus scanners on the market today.

"Last week, I had two of these samples that were detected by two out of 32 different anti-virus scanners, and another that was completely undetected," he said.

The specificity of information sought in the targeted attacks also suggests the attackers are searching for intelligence that might be useful or valuable to a group that wants to keep tabs on human rights groups, said Nathan Dorjee, a graduate student who provides technology support to Students for a Free Tibet.

Dorjee said one recent e-mail attack targeted at the group's members included a virus designed to search victim's computers for encryption keys used to mask online communications. The attackers in this case were searching for PGP keys, a specific technology that group members routinely use to prevent outsiders or eavesdroppers from reading any intercepted messages.

Dorjee said the attacks have been unsettling but ineffective, as the Students for a Free Tibet network mostly operates on more secure platforms, such as Apple computers and machines powered by open source operating systems.

If you're talking viruses, you're essentially talking Windows (at the moment, at least). So as Students for a Free Tibet is finding, open source is doubly your friend: it's low cost and high security in the face of this kind of mature discussion.

Cringely on Open Education

I've always had a rather ambivalent attitude to Robert X. Cringely, not least because I go so far back that I remember all the messy business with Infoworld when he left, and that strange time when there were several Cringelies knocking around simultaneously.

Anyway, his PBS column is always well written and frequently illuminating. His latest is about education - or rather, about open education, since he muses on the changing way people will learn, and that means open education. There's a very nice insight about halfway through:

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I'm sure today Dave wouldn't bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work?

I remember coming to the same conclusion sometime in the mid-1990s, when I found myself using the Altavista search engine (remember that?) for everything. More importantly, as Cringely notes, I found that remembering how I got to information was the key skill.

Yahoo and MSN Help Root Out Tibetan Rioters

Yahoo China pasted a "most wanted" poster across its homepage today in aid of the police's witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move, although it didn't go as far as publishing the list on its homepage.

With business morals like that, Yahoo and Microsoft are obviously made for each other. (Via RConversation.)

Larry Lessig's Open Congress

I have a lot of time for Larry Lessig. He's a nice bloke, very bright but disarmingly modest. Nonetheless, when I heard about his plans to give up copyfighting and move on to tackling political corruption, I thought he'd lost it. However laudable, the whole project looked utterly hopeless. Much better, it seemed to me, to try to subvert the system indirectly, using technology - that is, the Internet in all its manifestations and ramifications - to peek and poke.

Well, it looks like Larry had the same idea:

Beginning in April, we will launch a second stage to the site: in a Wikipedia-inspired manner, wiki-workers will track the reform-related positions of candidates who have not yet taken a pledge. If a candidate, for example, has endorsed Public Campaign's bill for public financing, we will record that fact on our site. The same with a pledge to forgo money from PACS or lobbyists, or any of the other planks in the Change Congress pledge. And once this wiki-army has tracked the positions of all Members of Congress, we will display a map of reform, circa 2008: Each Congressional district will be colored in either (1) dark red, or dark blue, reflecting Republicans or Democrats who have taken a pledge, (2) light red or light blue, tracking Republicans and Democrats who have not taken our pledge, but who have signaled support for planks in the Change-Congress platform, or (3) for those not taking the pledge and not signaling support for a platform of reform, varying shades of sludge, representing the percentage of the Member's campaign contributions that come from PACs or lobbyists.

What this map will reveal, we believe, is something that not many now actually realize: that the support for fundamental reform is broad and deep. That recognition in turn will encourage more to see both the need for reform, and the opportunity that this election gives us to achieve it. Apathy is driven by the feeling that nothing can be done. This Change Congress map will demonstrate that in fact, something substantial can be done. Now.

One of the most powerful aspects of openness in any field is that it lets people see what is really going on, so that they can make informed decisions. What Larry is trying to do is to open up the engine of Congress to scrutiny. I wish him every success.

FLOSSInclude

FLOSSInclude may sound like a dental hygiene programme, but is in fact yet another heartening exmaple of the EU backing open source:

The FLOSSInclude project aims to strengthen Europe's participation in international research in FLOSS and open standards, by studying what is needed to increase the deployment, development and societal impact of FLOSS in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The project will result in a sound understanding of the FLOSS-related needs of the target regions. It will federate local and regional development initiatives with the support of cooperation with current EU research. It will also provide a roadmap for future EU research cooperation in this area.

(Via FOSSBazaar.)

Volantis Code Takes Flight with GPLv3

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Ultimate Ultraportable List

I've written a number of times about wannabe Asus EEE PCs, but there are now so many popping up hither and thither (a *very* good sign) that it's getting hard to keep them all straight. Happily, Laptop Magazine has put together a handy cheatsheet that saves us all the effort.