September 01, 2011 -Laptop-tracking company Absolute Software faced charges for intentionally spying on explicit chats from a client’s stolen computer.

The complainant is 52-year-old Susan Clements-Jeffrey, a teacher who renewed romance with Carlton Smith, her highschool sweetheart. Clements reportedly exchanged sexually explicit email and personal messages with Smith using a laptop she bought from her student.

A rule was made last week by US Districty Judge Walter Rice against the tracking company, which provides software and services for tracking stolen computers.

In an interview with Wired.com, there were solid grounds to infer that Absolute went beyond its boundaries by invading Clement’s privacy.

“It is one thing to cause a stolen computer to report its IP address or its geographical location in an effort to track it down. It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting the electronic communications of the person using the stolen laptop,” said Rice.

Absolute sought a summary judgment,and insisted that their theft recovery agent did only the proper thing, that is, when he captured the explicit images of the couple communicating via webcam. The images were then forwarded to the police in an effort to return the stolen computer to its rightful owner.

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Well the wild ride that was August appears to have tapered off a bit as the month drew to a close, so Linux bloggers have finally had a few days to stop and catch their breath.
Bartenders throughout the blogosphere have had a chance to restock their supplies, and conversations have, for the most part, returned to normal volumes.
The one exception in that last respect, however, has been a debate that’s actually been gaining momentum over the past few weeks since the Free Software Foundation’s Brett Smith published a little piece entitled, “Android GPLv2 termination worries: one more reason to upgrade to GPLv3.”

‘Make the Switch to GPLv3′
“When we wrote GPLv2 in 1991, we didn’t imagine that a free software project might have hundreds of copyright holders, making it so difficult to get a violator’s rights restored,” Smith wrote.
“We want it to be easy for a former violator to know that they’re still allowed to change and share the software; if they stop distribution because of legal uncertainty, fewer people will have free software in the long run,” he explained. “Hence, we created new termination provisions for GPLv3. These terms offer violators a simple method to earn back the rights they had.”
Because of that and for other reasons, “we urge developers who are releasing projects under GPLv2 to upgrade to GPLv3,” Smith concluded. “Companies that sell products that use Android can help out by encouraging the developers of Linux to make the switch to GPLv3.”
‘Is It Fair to Use FUD?’
Smith’s piece sat quietly for several days before Linux bloggers noticed it. Once they did, however, there was no stopping them.

“FSF uses unproven compliance issue to promote GPLv3,” was the charge over at ITworld, for example. “Is it fair to use FUD to promote GPLv3 over GPLv2?”
“New GPL licence touted as saviour of Linux, Android,” was the wry observation at The Register.
Linux Girl’s Debate-o-Meter started screaming soon afterward, so she headed straight for the blogosphere’s Punchy Penguin Saloon to learn more.

‘Inviting Abuse’
“GPLv3 Linux for Android? That’s so bad it’s not even wrong!” began Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by “Tom” on the site.
“Mobile phone manufacturers don’t make different silicon for each market — instead, they customize the device’s software so that the phone can be type-approved by each country individually,” Hudson explained.
A GPLv3 Android phone, however, “with all the decryption keys available to any user on demand, is just inviting abuse,” Hudson opined. “No manufacturer would make such an insecure-by-design device, and no telco would put the stability of their network at such risk.”
‘You Automatically Receive a New License’
In addition, “despite the article’s claim of ‘permanent termination,’ it’s very easy to get a new license to redistribute a GPLv2 program — just download or otherwise get a new copy, as per section 6 of the GPLv2, and you automatically receive a new license grant, which is valid as long as you are in compliance,” Hudson pointed out.
“While this doesn’t ‘whitewash’ any problems that arose under the old license grant, it’s clear that the new license cannot have additional restrictions, such as a past license termination, imposed on it,” she added.
Hudson actually went so far as to contact Smith, the article’s author, to point out “these and other issues,” she told Linux Girl. “He insists that once a license is terminated, that’s it.
“However, the law is clear: in all ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ contracts such as the GPL, the contract must be interpreted in the recipient’s favor (contra proferentem),” Hudson pointed out. “Companies in compliance have the legal right to rely on the grant provided by section 6 of the GPL.”

‘People Acting Like the GNUstapo’
Ultimately, “this is not about Android and Linux licensing, but about pushing an agenda,” Hudson concluded. “The usual suspects have made Android and Linux licensing a hot issue. The last thing we need is people acting like the GNUstapo and adding fuel to the fire.”
Meanwhile, “it’s a safe bet Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is working on a BSD-hosted version of Android as a fallback,” she added. “If I were them, that’s what I’d be doing.”
Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor, saw a different problem with GPLv3.

The Anti-Tivoization Effect
“I do not see anything wrong with the new termination clauses in GPLv3,” Lim told Linux Girl, “but there is one issue in GPL version 3 which I think should be considered seriously.”
Namely, whereas companies that make devices running GPL software “can use digital rights management technologies to make sure that the device will only function with its official software” — known as “Tivoization” — “GPLv3 wants to prevent Tivoization and force Mr. Manufacturer to allow end users to modify the software installed on the appliance or device for their own purposes without restriction,” Lim pointed out.
“This is effected by requiring that the source code be accompanied by any activation keys or methods which would allow the end user to run modified software on his device,” he added.

‘GPLv3 Will Place Them at Risk’
“Maybe a few years ago that would have been a good idea — that was back when we would pay full price on our hardware,” Lim suggested. “But we are moving into an area where manufacturers are now also service providers. Like Amazon’s (Nasdaq: AMZN) coming tablet, they might subsidize the cost of new hardware in exchange for the profits they expect to make from after-sales profits from software and services.”
GPLv3, then, “will place them at risk of having their subsidized hardware used for purposes other than intended and may make Linux adoption harder,” he asserted.
“Is the point of GPL to allow others to build on your achievement and make entirely new things, or is it to allow users to tinker with the devices themselves? I think it is the former,” Lim concluded, “and GPLv3 benefits a very small, but very noisy, segment.”

‘Simply Too Much Work’
Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack saw yet another problem.
“The FSF forgets that for many cases, changing the existing license is impossible,” Mack said.
“To switch the license, each contributor with code still in the project must agree to a change, and some projects are now so large that it’s difficult to find everyone,” he pointed out. “Replacing the code of everyone who can’t be found is simply too much work. In the case of some projects, some of the original authors are even dead.”
Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, didn’t see anything new in the FSF’s pro-GPLv3 effort.
“They have been doing this since the GPLv3 came out,” he explained. “Anyone who bought the FSF’s line has probably already switched. Those of us who don’t like things in the GPLv3 will stick with the GPLv2 and ignore them.”

‘They Better Hope Oracle Wins’
For Slashdot blogger hairyfeet, however, the FSF’s effort is too little and too late, he told Linux Girl.
“The FSF and even Torvalds don’t own FOSS anymore — Google does,” hairyfeet explained.
“If Google were to fork the kernel tomorrow, how many developers do you think would follow it?” he asked. “Sadly, as much as FOSS users like to go, ‘boo hiss’ at Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL), they better hope Oracle wins against Google.
“If they lose? Well, it’s not a mystery why Google doesn’t allow GPLv3 anywhere near Android,” he added. “As one of the guys at Google said, ‘Android is open FOR OEMS’; the unspoken part of that is, ‘and not for you, silly user!’”

‘FSF Is Right to Push for GPLv3′
Indeed, “one of the few differences I have with Google and Android/Linux is the crummy license Google chose,” blogger Robert Pogson told Linux Girl. “They could have dashed off a typical platform of GNU/Linux with the GPL but chose other software just to avoid the GPL.
“Now look what’s happened: They’ve closed a lot of the source on Android 3.x and no one knows where they stand,” Pogson explained. “Can Samsung trust Google now that Google’s bought Motorola? How open is the Open Handset Alliance now that some of the code is closed? This is a huge mistake, and FSF is right to push for GPLv3 or better.”
In fact, “we should be making software and hardware, not fighting over the code,” Pogson opined. “By forking Linux and closing the code, Google is making the old guard look good. At least they were consistent.”
Pogson “can forgive Google for not thinking this through from the beginning,” he added. “Who knew how big Android/Linux would get?
“The world needs good IT, but this is not the way to do it,” Pogson concluded. “Being consistent and sticking with FLOSS would have prevented so many problems no one needs.”

The current government has vowed to change the civil service mindset that has always preferred to spend money with the biggest firms and has been conservative about open source software.
The Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude has vowed to create a level playing field for open source as part of a drive to cut costs.
Now a BBC Freedom of Information (FOI) request has given us a glimpse of how big the challenge will be.
We asked government departments for details of how much they had spent on proprietary software over the past year, and how much open source software they had acquired.
The responses have been dribbling in for months now (available as a Google doc, an Excel spreadsheet or as separate .csv files below), and they’ve varied from detailed accounts of software and expenditure, to refusals to provide any information on the grounds that it would cost too much.
Our excellent FOI researcher Julia Ross has compiled a spreadsheet of each department’s responses.

Mixed response
This is not the kind of FOI request that unveils some shocking secret, but it does provide insights into the kind of software civil servants are buying, and why open-source providers may struggle to get a hearing.
So, for instance, the Home Office provided a detailed list of about £26m worth of proprietary software acquired over 18 months.
Of that, £21m went to just one business, Raytheon Systems for “IT, Broadcasting and Telecoms software”.
It seems extraordinary to push something like 80% of your software budget to one provider – but who knows whether an open-source supplier could have provided a product that would have done the job?
The Ministry of Defence was unable to provide a breakdown but says its biggest IT organisation DE&S ISS spent £40.7m on procuring software between February 2009 and March 2011.

Perhaps not a huge budget for such a big organisation but where did the money go?
They do mention a few products – much of it security software like McAfee Anti Virus – but do not say what individual items cost.
In its response the department says that, while it is progressively taking a more centralised approach, “there is no centrally held record of software (proprietary or open source) held across the MOD”.
The name plate for 22 Whitehall Is there an appetite for open source in Whitehall?
There is also a partial list of some open-source products used, including the Firefox browser – though last time I inquired it seemed you were more likely to find an ancient version of Internet Explorer on a soldier’s desktop PC.
By contrast, the Department for Schools did supply quite a lot of detail.
One item that caught my eye was £164,063 on something called Colligo Solution.
This is described as something which will “enhance the interoperability of Microsoft Office 2003 specifically Microsoft Outlook/Exchange 2003, with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007″ for all of the department’s 3,500 staff.
I asked Stuart Mackintosh of the open-source firm OpusVL for his view on what the documents revealed.
He is on a Cabinet Office committee advising on how open source might best be promoted in Whitehall, and is not unsympathetic to the efforts of some civil servants to make this happen.
But he points to that Colligo Solution software – needed to upgrade an existing Microsoft program – as an example of the challenges.
“I don’t know the exact story with that product but often they’ve already wasted a lot of money in the wrong place,” he says. “They’re locked in, and then they need to pay more money to stay where they are.”

Uphill struggle
He thinks there is a big cultural problem because, while civil servants know how to deal with big firms like Microsoft and have existing relationships with them, they simply don’t know how to start with open source.

“How do you buy something that’s free?” he asks. “It’s the job of people like me to help them work it out.”
Mr Mackintosh also believes that by outsourcing so much of its IT operations, Whitehall has lost the ability to understand what might work.
He says: “They need to be able to take a few more risks, but they don’t have the skills internally to assess the software.”
I also showed the documents to Bryan Glick who, as editor of Computer Weekly, spends much of his time reporting on government IT policy.
Pointing at the numerous small amounts spent here and there he says: “It shows how little centralised spending control there is and how much duplication.”
This, he thought, reinforced what Sir Philip Green said in his purchasing review last year about government missing out on economies of scale.
Bryan was not surprised that many of the government departments could not give us much detail on their software spending.
“Where a large private sector firm would almost certainly have some form of software asset register for audit purposes, there’s nothing like that in Whitehall,” he explained, “although they’re working on just that at the Cabinet Office.”
Right now, the idea of trying to work with Whitehall is pretty daunting to small, open-source providers.
The good news is that there is plenty of political weight behind opening the doors to new software ideas – especially if they can save money.

If there’s one hard rule in tech, it’s that doing hardware while trying to license software is a losing battle. No, that isn’t right — it is typically a multibillion-dollar disaster. So what does Google — the company that hasn’t met a Microsoft mistake it doesn’t repeat — do? It buys Motorola and announces “Android Will Stay Open.” Which in tech speak means it probably won’t be open much longer.
We have crazy months from time to time, but August will likely go down in history as one of the biggest tech news months of any year. From the torpedoing of Android by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), to the off-again, on-again TouchPad sales, to the departure of Steve Jobs, to the slashing of Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) US$1.3 billion settlement, to the…
Well I’ll get to all this in a moment, and I’m sure we are all glad to look back at the insane month of August.
I’ll end with my product of the week: the first five-door hatchback that I might actually be tempted to buy, the Audi A7.

HP’s Do-Over Month
August was the month that I think HP (NYSE: HPQ) would like to do over. Pretty much every time I turned around, I was trying to explain something it did. It may have had good reasons, but with its valuation down sharply, its execution left a bit to be desired.
The biggest was its getting out of, er selling, er spinning out, the PC business. Now to be clear, nothing will be changing at all in the next 12 to 18 months, and then you’ll only know the plan — which will likely take three to 24 months to execute (depending on the details). So there should have be no news here, certainly nothing actionable.
Yet by announcing it was thinking of doing something big, it scared the crap out of buyers (both consumers and businesses) and investors, and put a smile on the face of Michael Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) and his peers at the other PC firms. The reason it did this was that the plan to develop a plan had leaked out, and given this would be clearly material, it needed to avoid an SEC event. Boy, if there was ever a firm that should borrow Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) “loose lips sink ships” posters, it is HP.

That alone would have been enough to cause HP to stand out, but it also discontinued its TouchPad and then un-discontinued it so it could discontinue it again.
Now HP made a ton of mistakes bringing the TouchPad to market, from the name it chose to the method used for the merger with Palm (more than 80 percent of mergers like this are unsuccessful).
Then Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) threatened to send a ton of unsold TouchPads back, and HP pulled the plug — this despite the fact that most reviewers I know placed this crippled product right behind the iPad, suggesting the second generation (which now won’t exist) could have kicked some Apple butt.
Then it un-pulled the plug because pulling the plug created too many short-term problems. The whole thing had some folks even questioning whether HP could run a data center.

Who would have thought that selling more tablets than Apple did iPads in a given period would be a bad thing?

Oracle Out of Luck
HP’s mortal enemy Oracle had a very strange month as well. There was the filing it made in the Oracle/HP litigation that must have been made to make it look like Oracle’s attorneys were doing something to justify their hourly charges.
They maintained that Oracle wouldn’t have settled with HP on Hurd’s hiring if Oracle had known HP was going to hire on old (like more than a decade old) Oracle CEO as chairman and an ex-SAP (Oracle competitor) CEO as the new HP CEO. These things were so not related, it put a new meaning on the term “throwing sh*t against the wall.” Seriously Oracle, no one was planning on pulling the plug on Itanium; this won’t fix that.
Adding to this impression is the latest news that Oracle had its $1.3B judgment against SAP (NYSE: SAP) overturned. That’s not chump change, and the attached pleadings would indicate that Oracle didn’t meet its burden. It is really tough to lose on appeal like this. It is great to see a legal team really step up.
OK, I shouldn’t kid about this because Larry is likely running around shooting attorneys this week. Wonder if he wants any help?

Speaking of help, Oracle fell under bribery investigation. Now I used to be an internal auditor, and bribery charges like this are a bit of an inside joke. You see, to do business in some countries, you have to use bribery. The only other choice is to exit the country, and no one — including the U.S. government — wants to you to do that.
On top of that, the cause is that the politicians and bureaucrats who require the bribes are too powerful to touch. So this is kind of a Russian roulette tax; virtually no one goes to jail — instead you pay a hefty fine and then are allowed to go on your way. You do this hoping the next company caught won’t be you (the Russian roulette part). In effect, it just became Oracle’s turn to be punished for doing something pretty much everyone agrees they have to do.

Google Buys Motorola
Boy, after Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) experience with the Zune, Apple’s with licensing MacOS, and IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) with OS/2, if there’s one hard rule in tech, it’s that doing hardware while trying to license software is a losing battle. No, that isn’t right — it is typically a multibillion-dollar disaster. So what does Google — the company that hasn’t met a Microsoft mistake it doesn’t repeat — do? It buys Motorola and announces “Android Will Stay Open.” Which in tech speak means it probably won’t be open much longer.
Suddenly Samsung — the company that hasn’t met an OS it doesn’t like — is looking to buy WebOS from HP. Boy, if there was ever a platform that didn’t need any more drama, it’s Android.
August also saw the Samsung Galaxy Tab get blocked and unblocked in a running battle across Europe, which also likely contributed to Samsung’s interest in a less litigation-prone platform. One accountant argued Google did it for the tax breaks. Sure it did.

Steve Jobs Leaves Apple
I’ve said plenty about this before (The Day the Magic Died), but Jobs is not only the glue that holds Apple together. It is largely his design influence that is keeping us from going back to cheap white box computers and largely uninteresting smartphones.

His exit as CEO did have a bunch of us looking back and talking about different aspects of the Jobs’ experience. One of the best was this piece on why Apple thought tablets were stupid. I did point out that one of our big problems as an industry is that under current hiring practices, Google, Microsoft and even Apple wouldn’t ever hire a young Steve Jobs.
And that is ending us on a sad note. But I think HP, Oracle, Google and Apple folks can all smile about one thing. August is over.
Occasionally I get to do car reviews, and I really look forward to them. The five-door hatchback has been one of those configurations that always seemed to work poorly — outside of SUVs, where it kind of dominates. My own Infinity FX35 is in this class, but we consider it a truck even though, being based on the car platform, it really isn’t.
The Audi A7, however, is the most perfect blend of performance and practicality I’ve yet seen, and it is wrapped with one of the most stunning designs and best technology packages I’ve ever tested.
It really is a very pretty car — supercharged so it is fast, and four-wheel drive so it sticks like glue. And it seems to draw admiring glances regularly.
In tech, it has the Nvidia-based infotainment system, which provides strong graphics, in-dash DVD playback (when you aren’t driving) — and new this year, tablet-like interface elements that are fun to learn and use.
At around $60K it isn’t cheap, and the S version isn’t out yet (which will be more) — but I fell in love with this car in the brief week that I had it, so it is my product of the week. I think of it as my portable man cave.

“Yep, just verified the signature, that pastebin *.google.com certificate is real,” said Marlinspike

Storms suggested that Google should quickly update Chrome, as well as Microsoft, and Mozilla.
“I suspect that if asked [Microsoft and Mozilla] will also issue updates, as there is already a precedent,” said Storms.