www.pwnage.ca

I was reading the blog of Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun which is now owned by Oracle (Thanks to Dr Schestowitz, Boycott Novell). He explains a meeting Sun had with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer who attempted to extract "royalties" for Open Office. They were refused but it's interesting to note that they even tried this crap with the big players. Isn't this delicious?

As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business. So that interaction was good preparation for a later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. They’d flown in over a weekend to meet with Scott McNealy, Sun’s then CEO – who asked me and Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) to accompany him. As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.” OpenOffice is a free office productivity suite found on tens of millions of desktops worldwide. It’s a tremendous brand ambassador for its owner – it also limits the appeal of Microsoft Office to businesses and those forced to pirate it. Bill was delivering a slightly more sophisticated variant of the threat Steve had made, but he had a different solution in mind. “We’re happy to get you under license.” That was code for “We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download” – the digital version of a protection racket.

Source: Jonathan Schwartz Blog

Greetings,

I know how you guys and gals love to talk about how evil oil companies or right wing fox loving republicans are spreading lies about mankind's impact on the environment. First of all I don't work for any oil companies. I do not trust right wing or left wing government as they are all controlled by lobbyists and other sources of income. I promote nuclear power, reversing deforestation and banning coal burning for power plants. I also recommend to my own government to start passing laws that require businesses to carry and maintain recycling bins for their employees (like we're required for our personal waste at home). Too many places I've worked at required throwing all waste into the garbage or taking it home. I also recommend passing laws to disallow corporations from leaving their lights on all night when nobody is in the building. Security systems work without lights and if yours doesn't it needs to be switched to a more secure system. My recommendations will likely never get followed as that would help the environment without World Socialism/Communism. We also wouldn't require the creation of a Carbon Credit currency which to put it simply, is taxing air exhalation.

Jeff Jaffe, Software Patent Supporter, Microsoft Apologist, Ex-IBM Ex-Novell FSF hating troll is now the CEO of the W3C. It is the organization responsible for web standards which have been promoted by Firefox, Opera, and Google. The w3c has been known for hiring bad staff but this just takes the cake.

News of this comes from Nat Friedman's twitter status quoted below.

Congratulations to Jeff Jaffe in his new role as CEO of the w3c! Jeff was my boss at Novell.

I just read an article which tried to convince the reader that slums such as that in Mumbai are a good thing for the planet. Here is an interesting quote which some may find chilling. Especially in countries which have economy related trouble. I personally find it chilling as I've heard Prince Charles made similar comments and it's a bad idea.

One of the theories I follow is that faux climate change issues may cause world poverty, leading everyone to these "solutions".

It appears conspiracy theorists aren't crazy.. A US Patent exists on technology that could modify the nervous system of any computer user or tv viewer. A brief quotation can be seen below. I wonder if any of this has been used in various online advertisements or in popular proprietary software applications.

Cory Doctrow writes on BoingBoing that a School Administrator had been bragging on PBS regarding his spying on students laptops checking for inappropriate use. Quite shocking how the administrator can sit there and monitor them using their webcam.

A few weeks ago, Frontline premiered a documentary called "Digital Nation". In one segment, the vice-principle of Intermediate School 339, Bronx, NY, Dan Ackerman, demonstrates how he "remotely monitors" the students' laptops for "inappropriate use". (his demonstration begins at 4:36)

Recently the Exo Performance Network made bold claims that 80% of Windows 7 PC's were running low on memory.

Unknown to Peter Bright of Ars Technica, Exo Performance Network's performance monitoring utility spies on it's users. He wrote a rebuttal to their bold claims and they wrote a rebuttal to his claims, even going so far as POSTING HIS ACTUAL NUMBERS. Obviously they have ways to tie that performance data to a person by name.

I was provided an e-mail from a source that has been dealing with David "Lefty" Schlesinger, aka Stonemirror, Aka Lefty from ACCESS Company Limited. I've personally had my own dealings recently with Lefty where I ended up telling Lefty to stop harassing me and as a result I was included in his unrelated criminal complaints against Mr Nath/Mr Hughes. It appears that since nobody takes Lefty seriously he now attempts to bring Richard Stallman and Bruce Perens into his exaggerated claims.

I will provide my readers the following quotes below from Lefty sent to one of his victims. The same victim who has naked photos of him splattered all over Lefty's site (verified by Samspades whois) Extinct Marsupial.

I don't know if everyone else has been noticing a trend on LXer. A trend of articles that loosely tie into the GNU/Linux ecosystem and end up on the front page of LXer. While other sites are also guilty, LXer doesn't spend a lot of time on Q&A (unless you're posting something anti-mono).

I saw an article featured tonight on the front page of LXer: Can Digium Succeed Where Red Hat Failed?

According to one article in ZDNet UK, researchers found a way to defeat and bypass the protection used on Chip and Pin Debit and Credit Cards used in the EU. If you're wondering this also applies to the same Chip and Pin debit cards forced upon us Canadians by TD Bank, and various other banks citing that magnetic debit card technology would be phased out.