Posted on January 12, 2011 by Simon Phipps
When Google announced yesterday that they were withdrawing from their Chrome browser embedded support in the HTML5 <video> tag for the H.264 encoding standard, there was immediate reaction. While some of it was either badly informed views by people who can’t handle indirect causality or astroturf trolling by competitors, some of it was well-observed. For example, when they said:
“Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable
open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources
directed towards completely open codec technologies.”
they indicated that a motivation was to only use “completely open” technologies in Chrome. Yet they did not mention Adobe’s proprietary Flash system, designed for embedded media programming yet definitely not “completely open” even by Adobe’s special definitions of the word.
Continue reading on ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Standards | Tagged: Chrome, Codec, Google, H.264 | 4 Comments »
Posted on December 29, 2010 by Simon Phipps
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board of Directors announced today that it has taken the unprecedented step of referring the proposed sale of Novell’s patents to the CPTN consortium (led by Microsoft and allegedly including EMC, Apple and Oracle – unlikely bedfellows) to the German competition authorities.
Continue reading over at ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, OSI, Patents | Tagged: Microsoft, Novell | Comments Off on ☝ OSI Refers Novell Transaction To Competition Authorities
Posted on December 28, 2010 by Simon Phipps
What crime do you have to commit where you live to be forbidden to walk on the streets? Removal of basic rights is a matter of criminal not civil law so moves to make “internet bans” easy are an unacceptable expansion into criminal law for something that was never even meant to affect ordinary citizens in civil law.
Read the rest of the article on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Copyright | Comments Off on ☝ Your Rights Or Their Copyrights?
Posted on December 23, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Over the last year, we saw them spring up all over the world, notably in Australia and in France but also in many other countries. It seemed odd that so many legislatures should simultaneously feel the urge to create extrajudicial protection for mainly foreign – American – copyright holders, especially in a market where the emergence of alternative models favours local rather than imported talent. But I believe Wikileaks has identified the carrier of the disease.
Continue reading over at ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ACTA, ComputerWorldUK | Tagged: USTR, WikiLeaks | Comments Off on ☝ The Typhoid Mary Of Three-Strikes
Posted on December 10, 2010 by Simon Phipps
After discovering BitCoin (where such a large number of people were kind enough to send small donations to 1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3 that I’m now considering paying for my VoIP with it) I’ve been accumulating a list of other non-centralised infrastructure that might evolve into something that’s both effective and Senator-proof. The list is posted on my blog over at ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Cloud Computing, ComputerWorldUK | 4 Comments »
Posted on December 7, 2010 by Simon Phipps
It used to take a bailiff and a man with an axe for the door, but the cloud makes it so much easier. If I told you that your entire business infrastructure could be taken offline by a government employee, or even a commercial provider, without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse, perhaps because a politician has philosophical issues with your activities, would that worry you? Yet it seems that the most popular brands on the market for cloud computing and web services place you at that risk if you follow the trend to cloud hosting for business infrastructure.
Continued over on ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: Cloud Computing, ComputerWorldUK, Issues | Comments Off on ☝ The Risky Cloud
Posted on December 3, 2010 by Simon Phipps
Image via Wikipedia
Let me say up front that I am not a massive fan of WikiLeaks. It seems to me that taking stolen correspondence and publishing it for everyone to read is a fundamentally sociopathic act, whether it is a rival’s love-letters or a government’s diplomatic cables. There’s no doubt that there’s a role for whistle-blowing journalism, but each betrayal of trust and privacy needs to be justified by the greater good it delivers, and I remain unconvinced that the cloud of hacktivists at WikiLeaks has taken on board that the demand for great responsibility to accompany great power also applies to them.
For me, it falls into the same category as The Pirate Bay; there’s plenty to disagree with in what they are doing, but the crisis they provoke is fundamental to the operation of the Internet. In reacting to WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay, both business and government have shown their true colours when it comes to citizen liberty and software freedoms. What’s disclosed is not pretty.
Read on over at ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK, Issues | Tagged: Hacktivism, WikiLeaks | 5 Comments »
Posted on November 30, 2010 by Simon Phipps
I’ve heard a few conversations in the last week treating open source interchangeably with crowdsourcing. Despite sounding the same they are very different, and the key difference is the ownership of the outcome. Open source is not the same as crowdsourcing because open source community members are stakeholders whereas crowdsourcers get less than sharecroppers.
Read on at ComputerWorldUK…
Filed under: ComputerWorldUK | Tagged: Crowdsourcing | 1 Comment »
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