We've been pretty busy with other tasks recently, and now I'm getting concerned about the Peer-to-Patent project participation, because I see some looming deadlines, and I forgot to tell you about them.

Hungary decided to re-vote due to irregularities. Here is the rest of the story, notes by Tomka Gergely, who attended the second meeting as a technical expert.

The UK has submitted its comments on the adoption of the draft of ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML (also known as ECMA 376) to JTC1, the joint technical committee of ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, and IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission. The comments were collated after several months of technical review by industry experts.

This Sunday is the deadline for an important standards vote on Microsoft's Open XML file formats, with early reports pointing to an inconclusive result--and a hefty dose of disillusionment with the standards process.

There's been a whitepaper making the rounds recently which discusses how a vendor can use virtualization to comply with GPLv3's anti-tivoization requirements, while keeping separate proprietary software locked down. Unfortunately, the headlines have had their usual sensationalist slant: "Can hypervisors circumvent GPLv3's 'anti-tivoization' clause?" they ask.

A lawsuit recently filed against the RIAA asserts claims, under the "Computer Fraud and Abuse" and "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization" acts, detailing the RIAA's alleged use of "illegal and flawed" methods when investigating people for downloading or swapping copyrighted songs without paying for them.

CSI wishes to clarify that at no point has CSI supported the proposed standard in its present form. (A statement from the Computer Society of India)

As one of his clients told us, "Mark Radcliffe is the law when it comes to open source software."