From the FFII:

EPO seeks to validate software patents without the European Parliament

Benjamin Henrion, President of the association, says: "The current plan of the patent lobby is very clear: avoid a new software patent directive, validate the EPO practice via a central patent court, and guide the hand of the courts via a decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal. They want to avoid the intervention of the European Parliament in substantive patent law."

In other words, seeing as the elected representatives have blocked a change in the law, the unelected quango will simply seek a change in the rules to make it unnecessary to change the law and therefore avoid asking the elected representatives at all.

This is crazy, dangerous and downright sinister.

"Considering that the EPO is an institution acting as judge and party, where the attributions and procedures have to be revised. [...] Demand the revision of rules of function of the EPO in order to guarantee that this institution can publicly justify the accountability in the exercise of its functions [...]."

Judge, jury and executioner more like.

Interested parties have up to the last day of April to send their comments to the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

Information for third parties wishing to file written statements

Communication from the Enlarged Board of Appeal concerning case G 3/08

(my comments added in bold)

In accordance with Article 112(1)(b) EPC, the President of the European Patent Office has referred the following points of law concerning the limits of patentability of programs for computers within the meaning of Article 52(2)(c) and (3) EPC to the Enlarged Board of Appeal. The case is pending under ref. No. G 3/08.

The questions referred are:

1. Can a computer program only be excluded as a computer program as such if it is explicity claimed as a computer program?

No, any computer program is excluded no matter how it is claimed because a computer program is not patentable. The patent claim must contain material other than a computer program and the computer program itself cannot be claimed as part of any patent claim nor can any computer program ever be deemed to have infringed any patent claim even if that claim was previously based entirely in hardware.

2.(a) Can a claim in the area of computer programs avoid exclusion under Art. 52(2)(c) and (3) merely by explicity mentioning the use of a computer or a computer-readable data storage medium?

No patent claim can be made against any method expressed as a computer program. It is the software that matters, not the paraphernalia of computers. Therefore, whether a computer or computer-readable data storage media are mentioned, any software is automatically excluded from patentability. If the claim makes no sense without that software, then the claim is excluded.

(b) If question 2(a) is answered in the negative, is a further technical effect necessary to avoid exclusion, said effect going beyond those effects inherent in the use of a computer or data storage medium to respectively execute or store a computer program?

Any effect is excluded from patentability if that effect is or can be executed by software. If the effect becomes possible via software at some point in the future, the software cannot be deemed to have infringed the patent claim because software is not patentable.

3.(a) Must a claimed feature cause a technical effect on a physical entity in the real world in order to contribute to the technical character of the claim?

Effects on the "real world" are irrelevant - if the effect is or can be performed in software, the effect is excluded and any software implementing that effect cannot be deemed to have infringed the patent claim. The real world still includes the electrons that implement the effect of software but software is not patentable.

(b) If question 3(a) is answered in the positive, is it sufficient that the physical entity be an unspecified computer?

No, the effect is not the issue, the method is the issue.

(c) If question 3(a) is answered in the negative, can features contribute to the technical character of the claim if the only effects to which they contribute are independent of any particular hardware that may be used?

Portability infers software and software is not patentable. A claim must be excluded if it is wholly or partially implemented as software or can be wholly implemented as software and no software implementation can be deemed to have infringed the patent claim either in whole or in part now or in the future because software is not patentable.

4.(a) Does the activity of programming a computer necessarily involve technical considerations?

No. Programming is a form of speech, it uses languages and different languages have different requirements for technical expertise. Some languages require little or no technical expertise to generate an effect within a computer by means of software.

(b) If question 4(a) is answered in the positive, do all features resulting from programming thus contribute to the technical character of a claim?

No software programming can have any technical character for patentability because software is not patentable.

(c) If question 4(a) is answered in the negative, can features resulting from programming contribute to the technical character of a claim only when they contribute to a further technical effect when the program is executed?

No, if the features result from programming then the software to effect those features is not patentable and the feature itself is not patentable. No effect of a computer program can be wholly or partially patentable.

The text of the referral in the English language is available under Referrals pending before the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

The Enlarged Board of Appeal considering the referral will be composed as follows:

* P. Messerli (CH) (Chairman)
* M. Vogel (DE)
* D. Rees (GB)
* M. Dorn (DK)
* K. H rmand (EE)
* A. Klein (FR)
* J.-P. Seitz (FR)

It is expected that third parties will wish to use the opportunity to file written statements in accordance with Article 10 of the Rules of Procedure of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (OJ EPO 2007, 303 ff). To ensure that any such statements can be given due consideration they should be filed together with any new cited documents by the end of April 2009 at the Registry of the Enlarged Board of Appeal, quoting case number G 3/08. An additional filing of the statement and documents in electronic form would be appreciated (Dg3registry_eba@epo.org ).

---

Feel free to add your own answers to the questions as comments.

I am not aware of any Linux Users Group (LUG) being active in informing it s members of how the policies of the various political parties compare with regard to free software and the other issues that are of interest to most members. I believe that this is a grave mistake. Shortly before an election there are many social groups that send lists of questions to all the parties. They ask about the policies the parties have in regard to the issues that they care about, and helpfully mention the number of members that will receive the response. This of course doesn t mean that every member of the group in question will cast their vote in the same way, merely that they will take note of the answers. The committee members of the parties in question will then decide how to answer the questions and whether policy should be tweaked to allow answers that the lobby groups will like. So this process not only helps members of a group make informed voting decisions related to issues that they care about, but it also helps political parties choose policies that are least offensive to the group in question. Here is a draft of a list of questions that I think should be asked of all political parties on behalf of Linux users:

1. It is important for all citizens to access all government data without being forced to buy new software or hardware, open standards allow everyone to access the data with free software. Do you support the use of open standards for data on government web sites and other forms of electronic communication between government agencies and citizens?


2. For long term archival of records it is important that file formats remain readable. The only effective way of doing this is to use open file formats that are implemented in free software. Do you support mandating that all data submitted to government agencies (by citizens or corporations) be in open file formats wherever possible?


3. In these difficult economic times there is a great interest in keeping jobs in the country instead of sending money overseas. To what extent do you support the use of free software that is installed and managed by locals (keeping the money in the economy) instead of importing software at great taxpayer expense?


4. Commercial software has a limited support period, after that time has elapsed there is no further support and systems become increasingly unreliable. Do you support mandating that all systems relating to the emergency services run on free software to allow quality long-term support by local citizens?


5. There has been a lot of concern recently about the spread of child-porn. The best available evidence shows that insecure home PCs that run Trojan Horse programs are a key part of distributing it and other illegal material. Do you support the introduction of government programs to train parents in installing one of the more secure free operating systems on their home PC to protect their children?

This is just a rough draft. Obviously there needs to be local differences (EG don t use point 3 in the US because MS brings money into the US economy). Does anyone have any suggestions for other questions?

13 Mar 2009
White Swan, Black Swan: nice vocals, I only caught a couple songs

The Donkeys
Decent band, fun to listen to. A good whale joke:
Two whales are sitting at a bar
one says to the other [long whale noises]
The other says, "man you are trashed."

Quick to get on stage and play

Phosphoressence
Good country rock band. Slow to start playing and some assholes decided to pop into the front of the crowd, they were tall so they blocked a bunch of peoples view. Then they gained an extra 3 people and started moving backwards. For once someone actually got inside my bubble.

7 Mar 2008 -- Red Devil Lounge
* "Three of" (good luck googling these guys) -- very good
* A, b, and C -- not good, the lead singers voice cracked a lot, they did look like they should be in the movie "That thing you do" (my first date was at this movie).
* Moonlight Sexy -- ok, Andy didn't like these guys
* Marcy Playground -- Great!

14 Mar 2008 -- Writers with drinks
S.G Browne with Breathers: A zombie's lament. The chapter he read was really funny. I think this was the best part of the night. The host was also really good, but the host could be described as slightly scripted talking out of her ass.

After reading the comments on my earlier post, Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem as well as some of the comments on the Slashdot story as well as the Ubuntu bug, it s become very clear to me that there are a lot of myths and misplaced concerns about fsync() and how best to use it. I thought it would be appropriate to correct as many of these misunderstandings about fsync() in one comprehensive blog posting. As the Eat My Data presentation points out very clearly, the only safe way according that POSIX allows for requesting data written to a particular file descriptor be safely stored on stable storage is via the fsync() call. Linux s close(2) man page makes this point very clearly:

A successful close does not guarantee that the data has been successfully saved to disk, as the kernel defers writes. It is not common for a file system to flush the buffers when the stream is closed. If you need to be sure that the data is physically stored use fsync(2).

Why don t application programmers follow these sage words? These three reasons are most often given as excuses:

1. (Perceived) performance problems with fsync()
2. The application only needs atomicity, but not durability
3. The fsync() causing the hard drive to spin up unnecessarily in laptop_mode

Let s examine each of these excuses one at a time, to see how valid they really are. (Perceived) performance problems with fsync() Most of the bad publicity with fsync() originated with the now infamous problem with Firefox 3.0 that showed up about a year ago in May, 2008. What happened with Firefox 3.0 was that the primary user interface thread called the sqllite library each time the user clicked on a link to go to a new page. The sqllite library called fsync(), which in ext3 s data=ordered mode, caused a large, visible latency which was visible to the user if there was a large file copy happening by another process. Nearly all of the reported delays was a few seconds, which would be expected; normally there isn t that much dirty data that needs to be flushed out on a Linux system, even if it is even very busy. For example, consier the example of a laptop downloading an .iso image from a local file server; if the laptop has the exclusive link of a 100 megabit/second ethernet link, and the server has the .iso file in cache, or has a nice fast RAID array so it is not the bottleneck, then in the best case, the laptop will be able to download data at the rate of 10-12 MB/second. Assuming the default 5 second commit interval, that means that in the worst case, there will be at most 60 megabytes which must be written out before the commit can proceed. A reasonably modern 7200 rpm laptop drive can write between 60 and 70 MB/second. (The Seagate Momentus 7200.4 laptop drive is reported to be able to deliver 85-104 MB/second, but I can t find it for sale anywhere for love or money.) In this example, an fsync() will trigger a commit and might need to take a second while the download is going on; perhaps half a second if you have a really fast 7200 rpm drive, and maybe 2-3 seconds if you have a slow 5400 rpm drive. (Jump to Sidebar: What about those 30 second fsync reports?) Obviously, you can create workloads that aren t bottlenecked on the maximum ethernet download speed, or the speed of reading from a local disk drive; for example, dd if=/dev/zero of=big-zero-file will create a very large number of dirty pages that must be written to the hard drive at the next commit or fsync() call. It s important to remember though, fsync() doesn t create any extra I/O (although it may remove some optimization opportunities to avoid double writes); fsync() just pushes around when the I/O gets done, and whether it gets done synchronously or asynchronously. If you create a large number of pages that need to be flushed to disk, sooner or later it will have a significant and unfortunate effect on your system s performance. Fsync() might make things more visible, but if the fsync() is done off the main UI thread, the fact that fsync() triggers a commit won t actually disturb other processes doing normal I/O; in ext3 and ext4, we start a new transaction to take care of new file system operations while the committing transction completes. The final observation I ll make is that part of the problem is that Firefox as an application wants to make a huge number of updates to state files and was concerned about not losing that information even in the face of a crash. Every application writer should be asking themselves whether this sort of thing is really necessary. For example, doing some quick measurements using ext4, I determined that Firefox was responsible for 2.54 megabytes written to the disk for each web page visited by the user (and this doesn t include writes to the Firefox cache; I symlinked the cache directory to a tmpfs directory mounted on /tmp to reduce the write load to my SSD). So these 2.54 megabytes is just for Firefox s cookie cache and Places database to maintain its Awesome bar . Is that really worth it? If you visit 400 web pages in a day, that s 1GB of writes to your SSD, and if you write more than 20GB/day, the Intel SSD will enable its write endurance management feature which slows down the performance of the drive. In light of that, exactly how important is it to update those darned sqllite databases after every web click? What if Firefox saved a list of URL s that has been visited, and only updated every 30 or 60 minutes, instead? Is it really that every last web page that you browse be saved if the system crashes? An fsync() call every 15, 30, or 60 minutes, done by a thread which doesn t block the application s UI, would have never been noticed and would have not started the firestorm on Firefox s bugzilla #421482. Very often, after a little thinking, a small change in the application is all that s necessary for to really optimize the application s fsync() usage. (Skip over the sidebar if you ve already read it). Sidebar: What about those 30 second fsync reports? If you read through the Firefox s bugzilla entry, you ll find reports of fsync delays of 30 seconds or more. That tale has grown in the retelling, and I ve seen some hyperbolic claims of five minute delays. Where did that come from? Well, if you look that those claims, you ll find they were using a very read-heavy workload, and/or they were using the ionice command to set a real-time I/O priority. For example, something like ionice -c 1 -n 0 tar cvf /dev/null big-directory . This will cause some significant delays, first of all because ionice -c 1 causes the process to have a real-time I/O priority, such that any I/O requests issued by that process will be serviced before all others. Secondly, even without the real-time I/O priority, the I/O scheduler naturally prioritizes reads as higher priority than writes because normally processes are waiting for reads to complete, but writes are normally asynchronous. This is not at all realistic workload, and it is even more laughable that some people thought this might be an accurate representation of the I/O workload of a kernel compile. These folks had never tried the experiment, or measured how much I/O goes on during a kernel compile. If you try it, you ll find that a kernel compile sucks up a lot of CPU, and doesn t actually do that much I/O. (In fact, that s why an SSD only speeds up a kernel compile by about 20% or so, and that s in a completely cold cache case. If the commonly used include files are already in the system s page cache, the performance improvement of the SSD is much less.) Jump back to reading Performance problems with fsync. The atomicity not durability argument One argument that has commonly been made on the various comment streams is that when replacing a file by writing a new file and the renaming file.new to file , most applications don t need a guarantee that new contents of the file are committed to stable store at a certain point in time; only that either the new or the old contents of the file will be present on the disk. So the argument is essentially that the sequence:

• fd = open( foo.new , O_WRONLY);
• write(fd, buf, bufsize);
• fsync(fd);
• close(fd);
• rename( foo.new , foo );

is too expensive, since it provides atomicity and durability , when in fact all the application needed was atomicity (i.e., either the new or the old contents of foo should be present after a crash), but not durability (i.e., the application doesn t need to need the new version of foo now, but rather at some intermediate time in the future when it s convenient for the OS). This argument is flawed for two reasons. First of all, the squence above exactly provides desired atomicity without durability . It doesn t guarantee which version of the file will appear in the event of an unexpected crash; if the application needs a guarantee that the new version of the file will be present after a crash, it s necessary to fsync the containing directory. Secondly, as we discussed above, fsync() really isn t that expensive, even in the case of ext3 and data=ordered; remember, fsync() doesn t create extra I/O s, although it may introduce latency as the application waits for some of the pending I/O s to complete. If the application doesn t care about exactly when the new contents of the file will be committed to stable store, the simplest thing to do is to execute the above sequence (open-write-fsync-close-rename) in a separate, asynchronous thread. And if the complaint is that this is too complicated, it s not hard to put this in a library. For example, there is currently discussion on the gtk-devel-list on adding the fsync() call to g_file_set_contents(). Maybe if someone asks nicely, the glib developers will add an asynchronous version of this function which runs g_file_set_contents() in a separate thread. Voila! Avoiding hard drive spin-ups with laptop_mode Finally, as Nathaniel Smith said in Comment #111 of of my previous post:

The problem is that I don t, really, want to turn off fsync s, because I like my data. What I want to do is to spin up the drive as little as possible while maintaining data consistency. Really what I want is a knob that says I m willing to lose up to minutes of work, but no more . We even have that knob (laptop mode and all that), but it only works in simple cases.

This is a reasonable concern, and the way to fix this is to enhance laptop_mode in the Linux kernel. Bart Samwel, the author and maintainer of laptop_mode, actually discussed this idea with me last month at FOSDEM. Laptop_mode already adjusts /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs and /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs based on the configuration parameter MAX_LOST_WORK_SECONDS, and it also adjusts the file system commit time (for ext3; it needs to be taught to do the same thing for ext4, which is a simple patch) to MAX_LOST_WORK_SECONDS as well. All that is necessary is a kernel patch to allow laptop_mode to disable fsync() calls, since the kernel knows that it is in laptop_mode, and it notices that the disk has spun up, it will sync out everything to disk, since once the energy has been spent to spin up the hard drive, we might as well write everything in memory that needs to be written out right away. Hence, a patch which allows fsync() calls to be disabled while in laptop_mode should do pretty much everything Nate has asked. I need to check to see if laptop_mode does this already, but if it doesn t force a file system commit when it detects that the hard drive has been spun up, it should obviously do this as well. (In addition to having a way to globally disable fsync() s, it may also be useful to have a way to selectively disable fsync() s on a per-process basis, or on the flip side, exempt some process from a global fsync-disable flag. This may be useful if there are some system daemons that really do want to wake up the hard drive and once the hard drive is spinning, naturally everything else that needs to pushed out to stable store should be immediately written.) With this relatively minor change to the kernel s support of laptop_mode, it should be possible to achieve the result that Nate desires, without needing force applications to worry about this issue; applications should be able to just simply use fsync() without fear. Summary As we ve seen, the reasons most people think fsync() should be avoided really don t hold water. The fsync() call really is your friend, and it s really not the villain that some have made it out to be. If used intelligently, it can provide your application with a portable way of assuring that your data has been safely written to stable store, without causing a user-visible latency in your application. The problem is getting people to not fear fsync(), understand fsync(), and then learning the techniques to use fsync() optimally. So just as there has been a Don t fear the penguin campaign, maybe we also need to have a Don t fear the fsync() campaign. All we need is a friendly mascot and logo for a Don t fear the fsync() campaign. Anybody want to propose an image? We can make some T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers Related posts (automatically generated):

1. Delayed allocation and the zero-length file problem A recent Ubuntu bug has gotten slashdotted, and has started...

No, you re not reading it wrong but what about 1.1.2? , you ask. Well, we made a small mistake with the soversion there (if mistakes regarding soversion are ever small, that is =/), so we had to quickly release a fixed up version before packages start showing up for distributions with an incorrect library soname. Apologies. With this release we have a shiny new website at http://webkitgtk.org/, hosted by Igalia and designed by Christian Dywan, who s one of the contributors to WebKitGTK+ s code. This new release sports many interesting features and fixes. You may remember me talking about the download support initially contributed by Collabora, which I was fixing up and pushing for inclusion. Well, it is now available, and already implemented in Epiphany 2.27.0. Christian Dywan tells me he won t let Midori stay behind Epiphany on this one, so expect support for downloading correctly integrated in Midori as well. Some more pet peeves got fixed with this release, such as scrolling with keys such as space bar, home, end, not behaving the way people expect. We also found more improvements which are in order for libsoup, and we ll be pushing them, even though we have added small workarounds to WebKitGTK+ itself for the time being. We have added proper logging support for our port, providing a WEBKIT_BUILD environment variable. Documentation on how to use this will follow soonish, but for now you can look at the LoggingGTK.cpp file to know what values you can add to that variable. Also notice that only debug builds use logging to its full extent! WebKitGTK+ 1.1.1 has now hit Debian experimental, by the way, and I plan to have 1.1.3 uploaded early this week. An epiphany-webkit package based on 2.27 is in the works, and should be in soon, too. There seems to be lots of interest in having a PPA for Ubuntu, as well, so we may see that happening soonish. We plan to get more testing this way, and be able to uncover and fix more bugs, so that we can get a rock solid release ready in time for GNOME 2.28.

I have just been asked for advice about secure filesystem and decided to blog my answers. The first issue is what is meant by secure filesystem, that could either mean the ability to restrict file access (EG by supporting SE Linux security contexts and using SE Linux for file access control) or the ability to encrypt data in case the machine is stolen. For access control I recommend SE Linux of course. For encryption on a local machine I mostly use dm-crypt which is configured with the cryptsetup utility. I encrypt at the LVM logical volume level as it is common that there are some LVs that don t need to be encrypted. For files that need extra encryption or files that are shared between machines I use GPG. A question was asked about kernel vs user-space filesystem encryption. AES is in the kernel so there is no lack in terms of strong encryption there. Also performance is pretty good (in most cases the CPU is fast enough that the hard drive is the bottleneck). For fine grained encryption (such as some of the experimental filesystems that encrypt data separately for each user) user-space is probably the only way to go. If you want servers to be high-security level and protected from hackers or unauthorised people then it s difficult to offer any advice that is smaller than a text book. I suggest that if you have such questions then you should do one of two things. If you are running a corporate IT department then hire an expert who can help with determine your specific requirements and meet them. If you want to learn about computer security and run your own systems in the best way possible then read as much from the experts as possible. If you are looking for a project to contribute to related to security then if you choose SE Linux I could offer some specific advice on things that need work. I suggest not deciding on whether to do kernel level or user level work up front, but decide first which area of security you want to work on and then select a project which fits - then you should be able to determine whether your skills are best suited to kernel or user space coding. As for whether developing a new filesystem is necessary, I will note that SE Linux works well on Ext3 and XFS, it has just become usable on JFFS2, and it will work on other newer filesystems in the near future. Adding SE Linux support to a filesystem is not a difficult task if the filesystem supports XATTRs. I believe that there is a lot of scope for other access control systems to be developed which use XATTRs for security labels. I can t advise on e-books. I generally don t read books, I read blogs and papers. Anything that I read which I consider to be worth recommending will probably have a link from my blog.

This weekend I mostly fiddled around migrating machines from Xen hosting to KVM hosting. Ultimately it was largely a waste of time, due to various other factors. Still with a bit of luck it will be possible to move the machiens next week. That aside I spent a while updating my blogspam detection site. As a brief recap this site offers a simple XML-RPC service which allows you to test whether incoming blog comments are spam or not. Originally this was put together to fight an invasion of comments submited to the Debian Administration website: The site currently shows:

Site	Spam	Non-Spam	% spam
debian-administration.org	238	372	60.98% spam

Depressing. But not as depressing as the real live stats which show since I last reset the counters 36,995 spam comments vs. 1,206 non-spam comments. (live updating counters here) Anyway I updated the service today to add two new plugins, both of which are a little reactionary. The first new plugin is called "multilink" and is based upon the observation that spammers rarely know the markup of the site they are submitting comments to. This means you can frequently see submitted comments like this:

 <a href="http://spam.com">buy viagra</a>
 [url=http://spam.com]buy viagra[/url]
 [link=http://spam.com]buy me[/link]

Here we have three different styles of links - "a href", "link=", and "url=". I figure this is a clear indicator of a confused mind, or more likely a spammer. The second new plugin is designed to stop people who enter "<strong>" words. It is a little coarse but actuall zero false positives in the real world so I'm going to leave it live to see how it works out. In happier news I'm just back from a trip to the beach. Sand rocks. Even if it wasn't windy enough for my kite .. ObFilm: Dracula ("Bram Stoker's Dracula" - 1992)

We managed to watch the multi-award winning "Slumdog Millionaire" this weekend. It is difficult for me to understand why people (in India or PIO's) are so upset about the movie. It is a good movie (I do not know enough about cinema to pronounce it a great movie).

• the narrative style is very nice --- question and answer.
• the editing is tight; the movie doesn't drag at any point.
• there are some very nice sequences and panoramic views.
• none of the actors stands out, but then none bombs out either!

As a Rahman fan since "Kadal Desam" (1993 or so), my opinion on the music is a bit biased. His work on this movie is more than competent though not his best. A. R. Rahman has written better songs than "Jai Ho!" and I didn't notice anything spectacular about the rest of the music. Still, it is worth noting that his best work is in the context of Indian-style films, where there are a lot of songs; the background score of those films only stands out if it is bad! So, I suppose that the criticism of this movie by Indians is largely based on its story-line and setting. This is strange, since poverty in a Mumbai slum (to the extent that I am acquainted with it) is depicted quite accurately here. The plot (like any Dickensian story) drives home the terrible nature of poverty in cities but still manages to inject a note of optimism.

If you are lucky/strong enough to survive with your humanity intact after growing up in a Mumbai slum, then the luck required to win a TV show is nothing in comparison.