Robert X. Cringely blogs about the misuse of so-called “unlimited” usage. Entertaining so long as you’re not a Verizon customer. Apparently 5 gigabytes of data is the limit for their so-called “unlimited” plan. If you download more than that in a month, your connection is cut off and you’re expected to pay [...]
Microsoft’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” is a push for encouraging users of illicitly licensed Microsoft proprietary software to pay for legally licensed copies. Microsoft sends out a program with system updates which checks over the entire Microsoft Windows system and informs the user if the program concludes that some Microsoft program is not “genuine”.
Of course, [...]
In what is turning out to be an ongoing series here on Digital Citizen, Apple has pulled another stunt on their customers: Endgadget.com says that Apple is upsampling lower resolution videos. In other words, Apple starts with a video at a rather low resolution and sells copies of it. Then they blow up [...]
Prof. Eben Moglen’s opening keynote from the “Wizards of OS” 3 (audio, play it now!): Die Gedanken Sind Frei (The Thoughts are Free). Informative, insightful, and a real crowd-pleaser. This talk is distributed under the Creative Commons By-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
As per usual, the EFF has important information and action tips on this surveillance amendment that Congress can sneak in through a port security bill.
They do for making programs and working on various projects, but the Open Source Initiative has quite a history telling people that it is okay to dismiss freedom talk.
I think highly of people, like Eben Moglen, who are able to work so well with OSI advocates. I think it’s important we all work together [...]
From FISL7.0: James Gettys of One Laptop Per Child (audio) talking about the project. This recording is distributed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
If you’ve ever wondered about this project or are interested in getting viable modern computers to children around the world, OLPC has an exciting project. OLPC needs [...]
Matthias Klang’s article in First Monday falls into a common trap regarding free software because they have an absolutist position on freedom, Klang promotes propaganda instead of clear thinking, and fails to do proper research. I’ll just consider the conclusion and a couple other parts.
I found Daniel Olivera’s part of this talk (audio) interesting (I only speak English, so I can only discuss the English parts of it), but I’d like to expand on the last part some more. This video is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license.
The initial versions of the Apple Public Source License [...]
GPL-violations.org has the scoop and Groklaw has commentary worth reading as well: Harald Welte, and his lawyer, Till Jaeger, co-founder of the Institute for Legal Issues of Free and Open Source Software have enforced the GNU General Public License (the preeminent free software license) in Germany again, this time against D-Link Germany GmbH. The [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley