K12 Open Source

Die Sonntagszeitung malt heute schwarz: Schweizer Strafermittler und das Departement für Umwelt, Verkehr und Kommunikation (Uvek) prüfen den Einsatz von Spionagesoftware zum Abhören von Internettelefonaten. Telecomfirmen und Internetanbieter sollen die als Trojaner bezeichneten Programme auf die PCs von Verdächtigen transportieren, um bei VoIP-Gesprächen mitlauschen zu können.

So hereby I want to announce that the code which was/is known as Swiss Bundestrojan/Superintendent trojan variant will be free, open, available and accessible to anyone who respects the GPL, and who is interested in the structure and construction of trojan horses and who is also curious what the root of all the rumours was.

Whilst listening in on normal telephone calls over landlines or mobile phone networks has become a routine procedure, Voice over IP connections frequently present a problem for investigators, especially when the persons being monitored use Skype via foreign servers or call direct from PC to PC and encrypt their data. The Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (UVEK) is therefore examining the use of spy software to allow it to listen in on conversations on PCs.

Few things must be more emotionally paradoxical for the anti-patentistas of the world than to see Microsoft get clobbered on a patent infringement action. Do you rejoice because one of the great advocates, and enforcers, of software patents has gotten a strong dose of their own medicine? Or do you fret at yet another example of a patent system gone mad?

I have the court documents for you in the i4i v. Microsoft case, the judgment, the permanent injunction, and the memorandum and order, which explains the legal reasoning in support of the order. I also got for you the original complaint by i4i, Microsoft's answer with counterclaim, and i4i's reply to the counterclaim, so you can understand what it was all about. The law firm that won has put out a press release. Microsoft, of course, will appeal. It has 60 days to do so. You probably think I am delighted. I am not. I hate software patents. And this is precisely why. It is karmic that this happened to Microsoft, who bullies Linux with patent threats and just got an XML patent of its own on August 4th that could, presumably, be used against the entire market. How stupid do we have to be to grant patents on software? On software *standards*? This is what happens. Now do you see it?

Utimaco LIMS distinguishes itself among competitive solutions by its comprehensive multivendor support. It integrates seamlessly with more than 200 different network nodes (switches, routers, gateways, application servers) by all leading infrastructure vendors. Utimaco LIMS enables realtime monitoring of telephony, fax, SMS, MMS, e-mail, VoIP, Push-to-Talk and other IP-based communication services. The modular architecture of LIMS facilitates cost-efficient LI solutions for small operators and is scalable for surveillance networks with several thousand concurrent intercepts. Utimaco LIMS mediates and delivers data in accordance with international LI standards by ETSI, 3GPP, ANSI/ATIS and Cablelabs. The highest security requirements are implemented in LIMS to protect all private data from eavesdropping and manipulation.

Structure Guidelines for DAISY 3, officially, the ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Specifications for the Digital Talking Book

# Free and open source software under GPLv3 # Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac # Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16 # Full EPUB spec support # WYSIWYG editing # Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View ...

n effetti, non molti sanno che la Commissione sta ancora aspettando il testo delle norme in tema di contrassegno SIAE e lo Stato italiano, con un provvedimento abnorme, ha adottato un regolamento che, addirittura, si propone addirittura di introdurre nel nostro ordinamento alcune norme dichiaratamente retroattive, forse proprio per cancellare gli effetti della sentenza Schwibbert.

Cette société savante publie depuis sa création en 1986 un bulletin bisannuel offert aux membres et vendu 15€ à l'extérieur. Or, nous avons eu il y a quelques mois la surprise de voir nos articles distribués par l'INIST (Institut national pour l'information scientifique et technique), sorte d'entité interne au CNRS assez autonome et aux missions pas toujours bien définies par la tutelle (voir rapport Salençon-Moatti mai 2008 sur l'IST). Voici comment cette distribution se passe. L'INIST demande à l'éditeur de la revue un abonnement gratuit. Puis il décortique chaque numéro et met chacun des articles en vente, avec une description sommaire (exemple pour un article de 1999 consacré au polytechnicien Paulin Talabot) (voir aussi la liste de tous les articles SABIX disponibles sur INIST, moteur Google interne au site INIST).

So I buy a Kindle book for my Kindle 2. It downloads to my machine. I open up the book -- it has no relation (except the relation of "not") to the book I ordered. Three emails, 4 days later, Amazon has still not responded to the problem. I wonder how they begin to discover/fix such a problem.

Broadcast from any phone to the Internet live. Useful for phone blogs, collecting audio data, podcasting, and other digital recordings

We are starting to see objections to the Google Book Search SettlementL2 this month in advance of the May 5th deadline set up by the court. The firstL3 comes from the consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog (foundL4 by way of the American Libraries news feed). They have submitted a letter to the U.S. Justice Department asking the antitrust division to delay the settlement until the "'most favored nation' clause favoring Google is removed and the deal's 'orphan works' provision is extended to cover all who might digitize books, not only Google." The letter in PDFL5 is available on the Consumer Watchdog website. The objections revolve around the provision that require the Books Rights Registry to give Google the same terms as anyone else who enters into agreements with the Registry (noting that more favorable terms might be required by a new party in order to compete with Google) as well as the fact that the copyright infringement protection for digitizing orphan works only extends to Google.

This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the "dead souls" to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.

At present, very few of us buy books in any form. If we could have e-books read aloud to us, however, we would happily pay for them. We are an untapped market consisting of some 15 million people to which authors and publishers have never before had direct access. For this reason, the position of the Authors Guild is not only morally repugnant but also bad business. Prohibiting the blind and others from reading commercially available e-books just means that authors and publishers won't get our money. The guild's position hurts both authors and people with print disabilities. In an age when how we get information is constantly and rapidly changing, it's important that people with disabilities have access to it in the same way that it is important for us to have access to physical structures, goods and services. Amazon took an important step in the right direction by including a read-aloud feature on the Kindle 2, but the Authors Guild is now trying to set us back. We are not going to allow them to stand in the doorway of the virtual bookstore to keep us out.

In preparation for WIPO's initiative on Exceptions & Limitations to Copyright, the US Copyright Office is currently soliciting comments on the topic of "facilitating access to copyrighted works for the blind or persons with other disabilities". Written comments are due next week (April 21st, 2009), and there will be a public meeting in Washington on May 18th. EFF will be sending our own submission, as will many other IP and disability groups. But if you've worked on software or hardware to overcome your own visual or other disabilities, or co-operated informally (perhaps in an open source project) to provide wider access to content for users with disabilities, or have dealt with a publisher regarding the accessibility of texts, we'd like to encourage you to send the copyright office your own stories - and cc: us at accessibility@eff.org.

The Coalition's mission statement says, "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra." (...) The Guild issued a statement following the protests, explaining its position: "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights." If the guild is trying to gain sympathy, it will have a very difficult time when it pits "economic rights" against civil rights.

Tue, 08/04/2009 - 14:06 - marc The native format for Stanza is ePub, which is the Open eBook standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum (http://www.idpf.org/). ePub is supported in Stanza Desktop, iPhone, and iPod Touch, as well as in Adobe Digital Editions and the next generation of e-ink readers like the Sony Reader (PRS-505).

"An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on either issue." (Reading Rights protest about disabling TTS and people grumbling about books over $9.99)