12.08.10
Posted in Asia, Microsoft, Security, Vista 7, Windows at 3:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Over a year after its official release Vista 7 is still used by just a small proportion of computer users worldwide
DUE to a great deal of activity defending Wikileaks we have not posted many articles recently, but we did not skip any new important news, either. In the daily links one can find several new examples where people are complaining about Vista 7 and then moving to GNU/Linux. In other words, Vista 7 has done almost nothing to suppress Free software on the desktop. Despite rampant copyright infringement in China, even the Chinese are not adopting Vista 7:
How about leaks of a different kind? “45.2% of China’s Internet users still rely on IE6….China’s XP share, however, was a staggering 81.8%…Windows 7′s share in China was 10.3%“. That looks like a huge share in China for that other OS but notice most of it is XP. The Chinese are not buying “7″. Those statistics also come from external sites mostly in English. Internal use may favour GNU/Linux more. The Chinese are not locked into the Wintel treadmill. They can easily go to GNU/Linux because “7″ does not run on their machines.
Do not be confused by US-biased ‘market share’ surveys that use improper metrics. Some of them would have you believe that China, the world’s largest Internet population, only amounts to 2% of the Internet's usage. What a load of bunk claims.
A couple of days ago we went through China-related cables (thanks, Wikileaks and Bradley) and showed that Microsoft puts Windows source code in the hands of TOPSEC, which trains and employs Chinese cyberspies, according to US intelligence. Here is the latest small example of Vista 7 being broken, technically. This is a security problem and Vista 7 fails where GNU/Linux does not. “The sad case of the ISP and the supersecret password” says the headline of this blog post: [via]
The key on the CPE worked fine for my Linux netbook and an iPhone, but not a Windows 7 laptop.
Vista 7 is hardly in the news anymore. It’s not at all as successful and revolutionary as Microsoft wanted people to believe, so it’s not surprising that Microsoft cheats in its reports and arguably shows fake numbers about Windows sales (the real numbers decline over the years). █
“One strategy that Microsoft has employed in the past is paying for the silence of people and companies. Charles Pancerzewski, formerly Microsoft’s chief auditor, became aware of Microsoft’s practice of carrying earnings from one accounting period into another, known as “managing earnings”. This practice smoothes reported revenue streams, increases share value, and misleads employees and shareholders. In addition to being unethical, it’s also illegal under U.S. Securities Law and violates Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (Fink).
–2002 story about Charles Pancerzewski, Microsoft
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Posted in Asia, Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 2:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Freedom and price are not interchangeable
Summary: Microsoft fights Free software adoption in Russia using gratis proprietary software which criminalises the user and to make matters worse, Microsoft also pays companies to abandon Microsoft’s competition
Microsoft assisted the Russian authorities when they started suppressing dissent and when people found out about it, Microsoft Russia NGO spin started to flood the press. It was all PR [1, 2, 3] and a classic case of damage control. CNET’s Microsoft spin blog adds to it with a report which paints Microsoft positively after the bad thing it did and it also neglects to say that gratis is not libre (dumping is not freedom, it’s a suppressor of freedom, which is why Microsoft tolerates and sometimes encourages counterfeiting). From CNET:
A Russian court has dropped piracy charges against environmental group Baikal Wave due to drastic changes made to Microsoft’s licensing program for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) back in October, according to The New York Times.
These NGOs that include the environmental group should learn their lesson and move to GNU/Linux, which puts them in control of their own destiny. Microsoft wants people to view this only as a matter of price, as usual. Carlo Daffara has responded to the latest PR piece with Microsoft's Rajagopalan. “No, Microsoft, you still don’t get it,” the headline says and Carlo explains why:
The question is: is MS interested in an OSS business model? The answer: we already give out things for free. Well, we can probably thank Richard Stallman for his insistence in the use of the word “free”, but the answer miss the mark substantially. OSS is not about having something for free, and it never was (at least, from the point of view of the researcher). OSS is about collaborative development; as evidenced in a recent post by Henrik Ingo, “The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating”, being open source allowed the creation of an ecosystem of companies that cooperate (while being more or less competitors) and not only this fact increases the viability of a product even as its main developer (in this case, Oracle) changes its plans, but allows for the integration of features that are coming from outside the company – as Henrik wrote, “HandlerSocket is in my opinion the greatest MySQL innovation since the addition of InnoDB – both developed outside of MySQL”.
Microsoft still uses the idea of “free” as a purely economic competition, while I see OSS as a way to allow for far faster development and improvement of a product. And, at least, I have some academic results that point out that, actually, a live and active project do improve faster than comparable proprietary projects. That’s the difference: not price, that may be lower or not, as RedHat demonstrates; it is competition on value and speed of change.
“There’s free software and then there’s open source… there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with,” said Bill Gates in April 2008. He insists on making “free software” just cheap software.
Here is another highlight of an old trick being used again by Microsoft. “Microsoft Offers Cash to Drop Salesforce, Seibel & Deploy Dynamics CRM Online” says the headline of this article:
Microsoft’s (news, site) made an interesting offer this week that promises organizations currently using Salesforce.com CRM or Oracle’s Seibel (CRM) US$ 200 per license to make the jump to Dynamics CRM Online. The question is, is $200 enough?
This is not the first time (even recently) that Microsoft does this and we gave some examples before. It tries to use its pockets to promote lock-in at the expense of smaller rivals (these companies are smaller as a whole). █
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Posted in Antitrust, Google, IBM, Microsoft at 2:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft is harassing Google through yet another proxy and IBM responds to the news shortly after realising that TurboHercules is indeed partly owned by Microsoft
Microsoft is not interested in improving or creating a reputation. It does not seem to mind being viewed as a malicious and corrupt company which engages never in fair competition. A few days ago we wrote about 'Consumer' 'Watchdog' right after we had shown that Microsoft was funding and then using many parties to cause antitrust trouble for Google in Europe. Microsoft has been doing to same to IBM and Oracle, as we covered here just recently (there are many examples).
“Microsoft has been funding an organisation seemingly set up to make trouble for the search giant” says the summary of this new article which explains what ICOMP is about:
But a key player in all of this that you might not have heard of is the Brussels-based “Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace”, or ICOMP, which has been lobbying for an antitrust investigation. ICOMP is a organisation whose sole purpose appears to be to attack Google: it was set up to protest against Google’s DoubleClick acquisition and has spent the last few years churning out blog posts slamming the search giant and approaching journalists out of the blue with carefully primed stories. Why does this matter? Because ICOMP is almost entirely funded – and not always wholly transparently – by Microsoft, one of Google’s main competitors in search.
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That last message arrived after I had spoken at length to Jack Evans, Microsoft’s Director of Public Relations (Legal and Policy) on the telephone about ICOMP. Although ICOMP’s reports and website do state that the initiative is “funded by member contributions as well as sponsorship from Microsoft”, until last week it was frequently omitting that information from its emails to journalists. Nor does the statement make clear that Microsoft is responsible for the majority of ICOMP’s money: Microsoft is ICOMP’s sole trustee and underwrites its funding – a fact confirmed by this PDF residing on ICOMP’s own website. The document states that Microsoft, as trustee, both selects ICOMP’s directors and guarantees its debts.
IBM’s Bob Sutor wrote about it: “More about Microsoft pulling the strings from behind the scenes to fight Google” (and this got repeated by a lot of people, obviously).
“So MSFT is behind Google’s, is behind IBM’s, is behind Oracle’s troubles in EU, what can go wrong?”
–Carlo PianaYes obviously, IBM suffers from the very same dirty tricks from Microsoft, which more recently involved TurboHercules and T3. Microsoft now owns a stake in both companies, but it wasn’t quite so obvious when they filed complaints against IBM (these too led to an antitrust investigation in the EU). Over in Identica, Carlo Piana wrote in response to Sutor’s tweet: “So MSFT is behind Google’s, is behind IBM’s, is behind Oracle’s troubles in EU, what can go wrong?”
Here is another new article about Microsoft’s payment to TurboHercules. Those who believe that Microsoft has changed must also look at what Microsoft is doing with software patents right now. █
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12.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Out on the web, M$ has an army of astroturfers proclaiming that GNU/Linux has less than 1% share of desktops and that “best practice” is to scrap working computers every few years and that a whole organization must run that other OS just because some particular application runs only on that other OS. These lies, repeated often enough, are believed by uncritical thinkers despite the obvious flaws in reasoning. Critical thinkers can find plenty of evidence that GNU/Linux runs on 5-10% of PCs, more in some places like Brazil where most barriers to adoption are gone. That share has been achieved with very little advertising except sharing by individuals. As new architectures like ARM and tablets come on the market and XP is killed, GNU/Linux will have a decent share of PCs and M$ will have failed utterly in its dream of a licence for each PC for its OS.
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From the 24 tests shown via the Phoronix Test Suite, Ubuntu 10.10 ruled when it came to the OpenGL performance, it was mixed between the two operating systems when looking at the OpenCL computational performance, and with the CPU-bound tests it was often mixed as to whether Mac OS X or Ubuntu was superior, but it seemed Ubuntu did do better when it came to more of the multi-threaded benchmarks.
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The Brazilian government education authority has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use nationwide. Mandriva is working with the hardware manufacturer partner Positivo, to deliver this open source solution which will help teachers to improve students’ education. Also, this will be one of the world biggest organized deployment of Linux, with potential to get to 1.5 Million units, and confirms Linux as a key, cost-effective alternative PC operating system. The hardware, operating system and software is targeted to have a per student cost around USD $200.
The Intel-powered classmate PC is a small and rugged, fully functional mobile PC, specially designed by Intel for primary students in emerging markets. Brazil will be one of the first countries to deploy Intel-powered classmate PCs in their schools to such a large scale. The Brazilian government’s decision to choose as Intel Learning Series solutions running Mandriva Linux on a classmate PCs reaffirms Linux as the preferred operating system for the global education market with Mandriva as the Linux education market leader.
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OK, so it’s a bit of a clichéd question, but with the awesome developments that have taken place in the Linux world over the last year, it’s worth asking again. Will 2011 – finally – be the year that Linux makes serious inroads into the desktop space? Are all the pieces in place to mount a major assault on Microsoft and Apple? Or are we barking up the wrong tree, and we should be looking to the mobile space with Android and Chrome OS for Linux’s future?
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Google
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Google said at the start that “Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” Google hasn’t always been on message with this.
Google also took its time getting even a Chrome beta out the door. Now that Chrome OS is about to be unveiled, we know that it is going to be Google’s “desktop” operating system, while Android is for smart phones and tablets.
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Thin clients are in demand for virtual desktops of all kinds, even “cloud” computing. Tomorrow, Google is expected to reveal an operating system on a device with the system intended to function mostly on the cloud.
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Tomorrow, December 7, Google is expected to launch its new netbook-and-tablet cloud-based operating system, Chrome OS. It’s also entirely possible that Google will simply show off the much-hyped Chrome Web Store. The event was only announced December 3, and it’s extremely unlikely that Google would rush the launch of something huge and consumer-facing.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Huawei, a leader in providing next-generation telecommunications network solutions for operators around the world, has become its newest member.
Being recognized as one of the world’s most innovative companies, Huawei is using Linux to develop network equipment and devices and sees its Linux Foundation membership as an opportunity to collaborate with a worldwide network of developers, users and vendors to advance that work.
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Apparently childhood in the Torvalds family is a tough affair. There’s this constant nagging worry about the parents caring enough that the kids are being fed. Only to be occasionally overshadowed by the terror of dead pets being flushed.
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Applications
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TeamViewer is an application for remote control, desktop sharing and file transfer between computers. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (even though it comes in a .deb or .rpm, it uses Wine which comes bundled with it).
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Proprietary
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Skype is hiring a whole lot of engineers. Many of them will work on the company’s mobile applications, as we reported earlier this week, and many will work on cloud-based implementations of Skype that would include working with third parties such as LinkedIn. This hiring binge is part of Skype’s big expansion in Silicon Valley, something I wrote about in July 2010.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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At the beginning of October there was the announcement of the Unigine OilRush game, a strategy game developed atop the Unigine Engine and developed by Unigine Corp itself as one of the first real games available to multi-platform gamers of this advanced, very interesting game engine. The screenshots continue to look impressive and it was supposed to be released in Q4’2010, but now Unigine Corp is sharing that the game’s release date has been pushed back to March of 2011.
A three month delay in Unigine’s first game release is a bit disappointing, but it comes due to taking longer to negotiate with their publisher and ensuring the game itself will be great for all gamers upon its release. The precise release date in March has not been given officially, but it should come shortly after GDC 2011 (the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco) that is running from 28 February through 4 March.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.
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Red Hat Family
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Now that I have spent some time with RHEL 6 I have to say that, over-all, it’s a good release. It’s solid, polished and comes backed by a great support infrastructure. Home users may be put off by the smaller repository, older packages or, for that matter, the price tag. Businesses though, Red Hat’s target customers, should be very happy with this release.
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Debian Family
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Interview with Asheesh Laroia, a member of the Debian Mentor Community.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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What I found particularly touching about this story was a poem that Manuèla wrote about her experience of joining the Ubuntu community:
I came in a community named Ubuntu.
Unsure if I was good enough to help with anything
Not really knowing where I ended up.
There came a blanket of warmth and cordiality to me.
Caring, social and tolerancity.
I did not know what came over me
It was like i was coming home after a long journey
And warmly was received by family.
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Today I want to talk about bug fixing. Tomorrow Jorge will be starting a weekly Bitesize Bug Campaign in which he will highlight a set of bitesize Unity bugs, that is bugs that only require small and simple fixes (and are ideal for new Unity developers), and work with the community to get those bugs fixed. This campaign is similar to the papercuts effort in that these bugs are rough edges that need sanding off. Jorge will highlight a new set of bugs each week, and he will also highlight those rock stars who contribute these improvements to Unity.
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Flavours and Variants
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The default Bodhi Linux theme looks very geekish, using black and green which at first I thought it would be annoying but I quickly got used to it and further more I ended up loving it by the time I’ve finished writing this post. Don’t worry though, it can be easily changed if you don’t like it from the Enlightenment menu.
Even though it is minimalistic, Bodhi Linux tries to cover every little aspect to make your desktop experience enjoyable. And for everything else, the new online software center (which should be available soon – read on for more info) will allow you to install any extra packages you may need to further tweak or enhance Bodhi with minimum effort.
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Phones
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Android
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Version 6.1 of the CyanogenMod Android distribution has been released.
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Today’s a Google day. The company, after announcing before the weekend that they had a couple of announcements ready to go for Monday, has officially pulled the curtain off their latest version of the Android mobile Operating System, Android 2.3. Its’ better known as Gingerbread, and for those in the development community who have been waiting to get your hands on it, the time is now.
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For a complete overview of what’s new in the platform, see the Android 2.3 Platform Highlights.
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Google has revealed Android 2.3, codenamed Gingerbread, a new version of its popular mobile platform. It introduces a handful of modest user interface enhancements—such as a more refined touchscreen keyboard—and brings some noteworthy performance improvements that are largely intended to boost Android gaming.
Alongside the release of Android 2.3, Google has also announced plans to launch the Nexus S, a new smartphone that was developed in collaboration with Samsung. Much like Google’s Nexus One, the new phone in the Nexus series will be available unlocked with a pure Google experience. The unlocked version will be sold at Best Buy for $529 without subsidy, and T-Mobile will be selling it on contract for $199.
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VMware is teaming with LG to sell Android smartphones that are virtualized, allowing a single phone to run two operating systems, one for business use and one for personal use.
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In a bit of awesome news, the android.view.KeyEvent class (that’s geek speak for keyboard controls in the code) in Android 2.3 has been updated to include support for what looks like Playstation phone controls.
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Tablets
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A 3D version of Google Maps will accompany a Motorola tablet running Honeycomb, the next version of Google’s Android, according to Google’s Andy Rubin.
Rubin showed off the unreleased prototype tablet at the opening session of D: Dive Into Mobile in San Francisco today, the same day that the company announced plans to ship Gingerbread, Android version 2.3. Honeycomb and the Motorola tablet will arrive at some point next year, Rubin said, showing off the Google Maps application and eliciting more than one “oooh” from the crowd of mobile professionals.
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The Document Foundation welcomes the new BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software, a software development project recently announced by BrOffice, Itaipu Binacional and the Itaipu Technological Park Foundation. The main software lab, based in Foz do Iguacu, will contribute to the development of LibreOffice (BrOffice in Brazil), and other free software projects. The activity is forecast to start in the first quarter of 2011.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that Google’s Wave communication platform has been accepted into the Apache Incubator – a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the ASF was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki last month by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration. In a post on the Apache mailing list, Google’s Dan Peterson says that the the vote to accept Wave into the incubator was “overwhelmingly positive”.
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The investigation into BP’s disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill has hit the buffers after a drilling technology firm refused to hand over access to fundamental software used on the rig.
National Oilwell Varco rejected US government demands to provide access to its proprietary HiTech application, which was relied upon by BP engineers to determine the presence of dangerous hydrocarbons in the well during the drilling. It said that handing over the code would mislead the investigation.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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I commented on Friday about the weakness that responses to Wikileaks have exposed in cloud computing, whatever your view of Wikileaks itself. While there are strong incentives to host critical infrastructure in the cloud or using web services, we saw last week both Amazon Web Services and PayPal – flagship brands in cloud computing and web commercial services respectively – suddenly toss customers off their services without judicial review, useful explanation or workable recourse. I’m sure they breached none of their own (voluminous) agreements. We saw other, less well-known companies (Tableau, EveryDNS) follow suit too, and even a Swiss bank finding a handy loophole. We also saw the US Department of Homeland Security start to seize domain names – this time at least by sending a court order to Verisign, albeit sealed, but without useful explanation or workable recourse. I sense we will see more of this happening.
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Education
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I want to see e-readers and epub succeed in schools but I fear restrictive practices will threaten their adoption. The future may lay with EPUB and the Open Education Resources project (OER)
[...]
Many others have noticed the problem of providing ‘school-knowledge’ for all. To many, including me, it should be free and free of restrictions in distribution. The Open Source model so well known to us in the software world is making inroads in the proprietary education system.
The Open Education Resources project embraces the likes of Wikipedia, WikiEducator and Open Text Books. The once hopeful project known as the National Digital Resource Bank seems unfortunately to have foundered (too expensive?) and is currently off line.
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Sugata Mitra is the founder of Hole in the Wall experiment, which inspired the writing of Slumdog Millionaire. On the same day he keynoted at Big Ideas Fest, a story about his Self-Organized Learning Environments hit Slashdot.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This year, the FSF will also be undertaking a series of new public advocacy campaigns to advance awareness for free software. This, our first series of general GNU/Linux adoption campaigns, is possible only because we now have fully free distributions utilizing a kernel, Linux-Libre, that has removed all the nonfree code normally present in Linux. And it is only possible because our new hardware endorsement program will make it increasingly possible to find hardware that respects our freedom.
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Openness/Sharing
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Who’s behind it?
The Eurostat Hackday is currently being organised by:
* DERI
* LATC
* LOD2
* The Open Knowledge Foundation
* Planet Data
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As many of you know, 5 weeks I had a conversation with a group of open data geeks (like me, likely like you) in Ottawa and Sao Paulo and we agreed to see if we could prompt an international opendata hackathon. At the time we thought there would be our three cities and maybe three of four more. At no point did we think that there would be 1000s of people in over 73 cities on 5 continents who would dedicate the time and energy to helping foster both a local and international community of open data hackers, advocates and citizens. Nor did we know that the wonderful people like those with Random Hacks of Kindness would embrace us and help make this event such a success.
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TSMC has many clients for its 28nm process, including Xilinx, Altera, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm, and has attained tape-out for 71 IC products. The 28nm production capacity will be fully utilized by the end of 2011, TSMC noted.
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As if you don’t know this already, Grooveshark is an online music broadcasting application.
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Much of the world’s food supply is transported via an inefficient, polluting, and dangerous system of highways and trucks. The overwhelming share of the fuel used to move food powers cumbersome vehicles, only eight percent is really needed to transport the cargoes themselves to supermarkets, according to one estimate.
So what’s the alternative? Move the whole system underground and set up a “transport industry Internet,” says the United Kingdom based Foodtubes Project, a consortium of academics, project planners, and engineers. Siphon veggies, corn flakes, and cans of baked beans about in high-speed capsules (one by two meters) traveling through dedicated pipelines lodged below our cities. And why not? That’s the way we transport water, oil, gas, and sewage, isn’t it?
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Nvidia is looking to pack more CPU cores into mobile devices like smartphones and tablets as a way to improve performance while preserving battery life.
Most of the mobile devices today contain single-core processors, which are not enough to handle new mobile applications such as 3D gaming and video, the company said in a whitepaper published this week.
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Science
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On one level the answer is simple: it comes from our mastery of our subject matter – it comes from our knowledge and training. In that sense, anybody with a Ph.D. who walks into a classroom should have authority. But we know that’s not the case. There are many professors who have to work very hard to establish themselves as authority figures. Some reasons for this have to do with personalities, level of confidence, and other personal attributes. But that doesn’t explain why, for certain groups of professors, their authority is not a “given” and it is not assumed. To believe that it is ignores the connection between individuals and their experience with (or lack of) privilege as members of particular groups. So, yes, we walk into the classroom as individuals who have mastery over our field, but a growing number of us also walk into the classroom as members of under-privileged and/or under-represented groups.
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The good news: scientists have discovered a completely new type of bacterium that could help with the disposal of old ships and oil rigs. The bad news: it’s eating the Titanic.
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With global networks carrying complex time-sensitive data, the speed of light is actually becoming a significant source of latency, researchers have found.
While today’s fiber optics-based networks can shuttle data around the world at the speed of light — momentarily slowed only by routing and switching — the vast geographic distances data has to travel can be a factor of delay, especially when the information itself is generated so quickly by computers and is useful only within a very short time period. At least one industry, finance, is starting to chafe at this limit.
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The mega-filament collapsed in a gorgeous cascade of hot plasma between noon and 2 p.m. EST. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a beautiful movie of the eruption (above). The explosion does not appear to be aimed at Earth, so we shouldn’t expect any magnetic storms or satellite troubles.
The loop of hot plasma has been snaking around the sun’s southeast limb since Dec. 4, and appears to be growing by the hour. When SDO saw it on Dec. 4, the filament was more than 250,000 miles long, about 30 times the diameter of the Earth. In the image below, taken at about 12:30 p.m. EST on Dec. 6, the loop of charged plasma stretches more than 435,000 miles, the full radius of the sun.
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Health/Nutrition
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Dwindling biodiversity could cause more humans to contract infectious diseases such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus, according to scientists who have reviewed the results of 24 separate studies.
Biodiversity hotspots must be protected to prevent the transmission of dangerous diseases from increasing, they warn.
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They don’t send out press releases, don’t have public information officers and their contacts are not widely publicized by the huge international humanitarian operation helping cholera-hit Haiti.
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Security
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The key on the CPE worked fine for my Linux netbook and an iPhone, but not a Windows 7 laptop. So he said he would change it, and suggested, nay insisted upon… 0123456789. We protested. No, he said, people wouldn’t guess it (I’m not making this up, by the way). We refused.
[...]
Cue much palaver testing various keys on various devices, but eventually we found something that would work on everything: a WEP key with few letters mixed in. Great. Now, on the issue of the 0-9, this engineer told us many Windows Vista/7 PCs have Wi-Fi password issues, and the ISP’s standard Huawei home gateway is partly to blame, and he therefore usually sets customers’ security to 0123456789.
Hence the depression. In the context of the Digital Economy Act, if this is the norm, we can look forward to an awful lot of court cases.
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The full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs that are fast becoming the norm at US airports – just in time for Thanksgiving! – do at least provide the answer to what should be done with Osama bin Laden if he’s ever captured: Rotate him in perpetuity through this security hell, “groin checks” and all.
He’ll crumple fast and wonder that 19 young guys in four planes could so warp the nervous system of the world’s most powerful nation that it has empowered zealous bureaucrats to trample on the liberties for which Americans give thanks this week.
[...]
Anyone who has watched TSA agents spending 10 minutes patting down 80-year-old grandmothers, or seen dismayed youths being ordered back into the scanner booth by agents connected wirelessly to other invisible agents gazing at images of these people in a state of near-nakedness, has to ask: What form of group madness is it that forsakes judgment and discernment for process run amok? I don’t doubt the patriotism of the Americans involved in keeping the country safe, nor do I discount the threat, but I am sure of this: The unfettered growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA represent a greater long-term threat to the prosperity, character and wellbeing of the United States than a few madmen in the valleys of Waziristan or the voids of Yemen.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.
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By co-opting doctors to supervise waterboarding, George Bush subverted their sacred oath to give himself legal cover
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The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) strongly condemns the criminal proceedings launched against K.K. Shahina, a reporter with the weekly news magazine Tehelka in India, after a story of hers appeared to cast doubt at the prosecution of a prominent Islamic cleric and political figure on terrorism charges.
Shahina’s story appeared in an issue of Tehelka dated December 4, released a week prior to the cover date. It is available online and is based on interviews with key witnesses cited in the case made by police in Karnataka state in southern India against Abdul Nasar Mahdani, an Islamic cleric who heads the Peoples’ Democratic Party, active mainly in the neighbouring state of Kerala.
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Today I read that the TSA will now tell children that groping them is a game. Terrorists, through a series of acts in one day 9 years ago, are now causing our children to be sexually molested when we travel. Having a stranger touch your genitals is not a game unless you are both consenting adults.
We need to grow up, crawl out from underneath the bed, trust each other and fight back. We need to carry our fingernail clippers and our knives on the airplane again. We need to give up the charade that we can be stripped of everything that can be a weapon. We need to fight back with intelligence, not fear. Invest all the money that is going into scanners and use it to fight terrorists not travelers.
Remove TSA from the airport process. Let airlines decide how to run security for their flights and let travelers vote with their money for the type of security they want.
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A few weeks back, we wrote about the FBI celebrating that they stopped a terrorist plot that appeared to have been mostly planned by the FBI itself — basically encouraging one guy, who had no actual terrorist connections, to think he was a part of a terrorist plot where none actually existed… and then arresting the guy. As we noted at the time, we knew of at least two other very similar stories, where US law enforcement appeared to set up people in such a manner.
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Anticipating the US attempts to block it though, WikiLeaks has taken the precaution of posting a big, 1.4-gigabyte file encrypted with a 256-digit key said to be unbreakable.
Titled “insurance.aes256″, the file was big enough to contain all the US cables said to be in WikiLeaks’s possession.
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Cablegate
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Yesterday Alexander Cockburn reminded us of the news Israel Shamir and Paul Bennett broke at Counterpunch in September. Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden has a significant history of work with anti-Castro groups, at least one of which is US funded and openly supported by a former CIA agent convicted in the mass murder of seventy three Cubans on an airliner he was involved in blowing up.
Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here.
Quelle surprise, no? Shamir and Bennett went on to write about Ardin’s history in Cuba with a US funded group openly supported by a real terrorist: Luis Posada Carriles.
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US and UK diplomats warn of terrorists getting hold of fissile material and of Pakistan-India nuclear exchange
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Guns and ammo from Turkey. Missile components from Germany. Guidance systems from China. Iran is on a global, clandestine mission to acquire weapons and weapons technologies of all sorts, diplomatic cables released Sunday by WikiLeaks reveal. And the Tehran regime is using a series of front companies in its attempt to assemble the arsenal.
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Last weekend, I posted that I suspected the KIPR tag on U.S. diplomatic cables being released by Wikileaks represented cables involving intellectual property issues. Sure enough, the first batch of KIPR cables have been released in Spain, confirming U.S. pressure on that country to reform its copyright laws. The release – which come from El Pais – has generated considerable commentary with BoingBoing proclaiming that it reveals that the U.S. wrote Spain’s proposed copyright law. That headline led others to speculate what the remaining KIPR cables might reveal, particularly the 65 Canadian ones (there are also 84 WIPO tagged cables and nearly 2,500 KIPR tagged cables overall). There has been one release on copyright law in France, with officials discussing U.S. industry support for its three-strikes approach.
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WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks’ own site is taken down.
But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a more hostile tone. On Saturday PayPal restricted access to WikiLeaks’ account to prevent fund raisers from donating money to help the site. In return, the PayPal blog page that announced the decision to shut off WikiLeaks’ account was taken offline for around eight hours last night by a distributed denial- of-service (DDoS) attack.
Experts at Panda Labs pointed to a statement from the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, which said that the PayPal blog would be the target of its first DDoS counterattack on behalf of WikiLeaks. Panda also cited comments from a Twitter account named AnonyWatcher, which released several statements related to the attack.
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It’s the latest financial hit against Wikileaks, which earlier saw its PayPal account suspended. Wikileaks own statement in the matter said that the account, with some $41,000, was seized after the bank found that Assange, “as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyer’s address in Geneva for the bank’s correspondence.”
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Public Safety Minister Vic Toews appeared unconcerned or unaware Monday of the WikiLeaks release of a list of sites and resources in Canada identified by the United States as critical to that country in the event of attack, natural disaster or other emergency.
“I don’t follow gossip very much so I don’t really know the impact of WikiLeaks, but I can assure you that the security agencies in Canada are following it very closely and to the extent that I need to be involved and address those issues, they will brief me on the issues,” Toews said in response to questions from an audience after delivering a speech in Ottawa Monday.
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Tom Flanagan thought assassinating Julian Assange was reasonable.
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We are succeeding in adding the Wikileaks censorship issue in the public agenda. Perhaps the time has come to propose a boycott against those companies who are suspending the services which support Wikileaks activity?. Please, think about that.
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It’s thanks mainly to Julian Assange and Wikileaks that people around the world finally have a little insight into the brutality and venality of US foreign policy. Assanges’ quest to let people all over the world know the truth and his refusal to stand mute in the face of duplicity and injustice deserve our praise. Moral courage of that calibre is rarely seen nowadays, and people need to know what is really happening and why. If he didn’t publish these documents you can bet we would never have known the truths they contain.
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As I write this, much of the international media is consumed with WikiLeaks’ gradual publication of a quarter-million US diplomatic reports. Why? Well first off, everyone likes to be let in on a secret, and if that secret involves acronyms like CIA, RAW, MI6, or ISI, the sexiness quotient skyrockets. That’s more or less just human nature. But the reports also provide grist for media publications—especially European ones—always eager to spread some dirt about the Americans. London’s Guardian, Madrid’s El Pais and Paris’s Le Monde were fairly salivating as the documents’ release date approached, and wrote with near-orgasmic prose once publication began. Their behaviour, too, was more or less predictable.
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Meanwhile, business group CBI has called manufacturing the “unsung hero” of the UK economy.
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Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power.
Now WikiLeaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document — and we can be certain that it will — Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.
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Since several major Internet companies cut off services to WikiLeaks in recent days, activists have created hundreds of mirror sites, Web sites that host exact copies of another site’s content, making censorship difficult.
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One cable reads, “A well-placed contact claims that the Chinese government coordinated the recent intrusions of Google systems. According to our contact, the closely held operations were directed at the Politburo Standing Committee level.”
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One of the many fascinating aspects of the Wikileaks #cablegate saga is that, unusually, computer technology plays a central rather than peripheral role in all this. And not just any old computer technology, but specifically aspects that are key to the open source world.
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Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) introduced a bill Thursday aimed at stopping WikiLeaks by making it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants.
Ensign accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his “cronies” of hindering America’s war efforts and creating a “hit list” for U.S. enemies by outing intelligence sources.
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MasterCard is pulling the plug on payments to WikiLeaks, a move that will dry up another source of funds for the embattled document-sharing Web site, CNET has learned.
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The WikiLeaks affair has twofold value. On the one hand, it turns out to be a bogus scandal, a scandal that only appears to be a scandal against the backdrop of the hypocrisy governing relations between the state, the citizenry and the press. On the other hand, it heralds a sea change in international communication – and prefigures a regressive future of “crabwise” progress.
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The Swiss Bank Post Finance today issues a press release stating that it had frozen Julian Assange’s defense fund and personal assets (31K EUR) after reviewing him as a “high profile” individual.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested Tuesday in London on a Swedish warrant, London’s Metropolitan Police said.
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Wikileaks has been dumped by Amazon and mirrored across the globe as it attempts to spread its whistleblowing message to the masses. But would any web-hosting company in Australia consent to play host to Wikileaks? The answer, so far, appears to be “probably not”.
Several large Australian web-hosting companies said today they would be unlikely to host the Wikileaks repository if asked to by a customer, for a number of reasons.
Bulletproof Networks has earned a reputation for stability and reliability with its customers. The Australian company hosts several large Australian sites which attract record amounts of traffic — and sometimes controversy.
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In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.
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Julian Assange’s lawyer has warned that supporters of the WikiLeaks founder will unleash a “thermonuclear device” of government files containing the names of spies, sources and informants if he’s killed or brought to trial.
Assange, the 39-year-old Australian who has most recently embarrassed the U.S. by leaking hundreds of previously secret diplomatic dispatches over the past week, has dubbed the unfiltered cache of documents his “insurance” policy. The 1.5-gigabyte file, which has been distributed to tens of thousands of fellow hackers and open-government campaigners around the world, is encrypted with a 256-digit key, reports The Sunday Times. Experts interviewed by the paper said that even powerful military computers can’t crack the encryption without the key.
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I’m tired of people saying that Assange/wikileaks ‘leaked’ the info. People from inside these agencies/companies do the leaking. Assange/wikileaks just reports it. All they want to do is kill the messenger.
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In State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, the Moscow Embassy describes how Intel bypassed Russia’s tough crypto import regulations
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With Amazon, Paypal and EveryDNS.net dissolving their relationships to WikiLeaks, leaving it without a stable home and a way to make money, Twitter currently serves as the only solid ground the Internet whistleblower has to stand on. This has left many wondering whether or not Twitter will eventually take down the @wikileaks account if put under enough pressure, from lawmakers or otherwise.
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PSSST. Want to share a secret? Here is the place to send it. But be quick. This postbox to contact WikiLeaks in Australia is about to shut down.
Australia Post insists its sudden decision to close the University of Melbourne Post Office has nothing to do with the fact that Box 4080 is the Australian postal address for submissions to the whistleblower website.
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The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian’s assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.
IIn the US, however, the government has a “heavy burden” for engaging in prior restraint of even secret documents, an established principle since New York Times Co. vs. The United States*, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. If we want a different answer for Wikileaks, we need a different legal framework first.
Though I don’t like Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposed SHIELD law (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination*), I do like the fact that it is a law, and not an extra-legal avenue (of which Senator Lieberman is also guilty.*) I also like the fact that the SHIELD Law makes it clear what’s at stake: the law proposes new restraints on publishers, and would apply to the New York Times and The Guardian as it well as to Wikileaks. (As Matthew Ingram points out, “Like it or not, Wikileaks is a media entity.”*) SHIELD amounts to an attempt to reverse parts of New York Times Co. vs. The United States.
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I wonder whether it has occurred to the US Government that copyright is the reason it is so hard to shut off the cablegate cables. Not directly, indirectly through technology evolution in response to regulatory change. Ever since the mid 90s the copyright industry has had the practical effect of energetically evolving new and better means of disseminating information.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The UN climate talks in Cancún were in danger of collapse last night after many Latin American countries said that they would leave if a crucial negotiating document, due to be released tomorrow, did not continue to commit rich countries to emissions cuts under the Kyoto Protocol.
The Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (Alba) group of nine Latin American countries – who claim they are backed by African, Arab countries and other developing nations – said they were not prepared to see an end to the treaty that legally requires all of its signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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Without a proper waste collection and management system, such nocturnal enterprises are not unusual in Uganda. These days, however, the two men turn rubbish into fuel. The friends have honed a technique to produce what Kyagulanyi calls “non-fossil fuel”, made from refuse such as plastic bottles, polythene bags and organic waste.
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The Obama administration reversed its decision to expand offshore drilling today, saying it had learned a lesson from the BP oil disaster.
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Nigeria’s anti-corruption police said today that they will charge former US vice-president Dick Cheney over a $180m bribery case involving energy firm Halliburton.The announcement follows a probe into the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant in the conflict-ridden Niger Delta.
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Could the whale wars be over? Things are looking very good in that direction! The whalers may be close to capitulation.
It is December 1st, at least on the Japanese and Australian side of the International Date Line, but the Japanese whaling fleet remains in port.
For years I have said that Sea Shepherd goes down to the Southern Ocean stronger than the year before, and the Japanese ships go down weaker. They may be weaker than we thought. They may be ready to call it quits. The illegal Japanese whaling fleet may be on the brink of surrendering, at least for this year.
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Aw man, and we were doing so good with those plastic bags….dang it. But yes, according to Global Entrepreneur magazine, China creates 30.6% of the world’s waste or an unbelievable 150 million tons every year.
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A global survey that looks at international efforts to address climate change has yet again ranked Canada near the bottom — just as the country’s top environment officials leave for a United Nations conference on the issue.
The sixth annual list compiled by 190 climate experts around the world placed Canada 54th out of 57 countries, ahead of only Australia, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.
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Italy is moving ahead with a plans to ban the production and distribution of non-biodegradable plastic shopping bags starting January 1, its environment minister told ANSA this week.
“There is no going back”, said Stefania Prestigiacomo, stressing that “producers had enough time to prepare themselves for this change”. The government’s plans to ban plastic bags, first drawn up in 2007, originally foresaw an end to their use starting from January 2010 before a one-year extension was granted. A campaign is being planned to inform citizens about the ban and about environmentally friendly alternatives, said Prestigiacomo. The environment minister is certain that the ban will have a positive effect.
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Finance
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This is the Japan you might remember from 80s television: all those documentaries about the far east’s new economic powerhouse and consumerist paradise, and Clive James snarking his way through clips from perplexing gameshows. As the dog wigs show, that side of the country still exists. And yet, in the intervening 20 years something big happened to Japan, something that places it in the heart of the debate over what Britain’s economy might look like over the years ahead. Decades before the British were bandying the term about, Japan suffered a major banking crisis – and it still hasn’t recovered.
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Rarely has the true face of the modern Republican party in America been exposed so obviously.
Just a day after President Barack Obama met with Republican leaders and came out talking of a new era of co-operation, Republican senators united around Mitch McConnell to sign a letter declaring they would pass no legislation without movement on extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
That legislation they are willing to scupper includes extending unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans, still suffering the terrible hangover of the Great Recession. The tax cuts the Republicans are really fired up over will benefit only the top 2% of Americans.
To put it even more simply: Republican leaders are happy to go virtually on strike in order to win a tax cut worth billions of dollars for America’s most wealthy people (which includes themselves and many of their top campaign donors). At the same time, they are willing to deny help to America’s most vulnerable; standing by as once middle-class people lose their homes as their benefits disappear.
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Thanks to tremendous public pressure and the recently-passed Wall Street reform bill, the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to reveal the details of its emergency bailout of the financial sector for the first time yesterday. From a quick review of the data now available on the Federal Reserve website, we can see that the Fed took an expansive internationalist view of its role, prompting U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to ask: “Has the Federal Reserve Become the Central Bank of the world?”
When AIG was bailed out out in Sept. 2008 and immediately passed on huge sums to overseas counterparties, including Société Générale (France) and Deutsche Bank (Germany), there was a public uproar. The Fed data out today confirms what many suspected. This back-door bailout of foreign banks was just the tip of the iceberg. The Fed data covers 13 programs amounting to some $3.3 trillion in loans. We could only look at a few, but in every program examined, foreign banks were huge beneficiaries of a taxpayer-funded lifeline.
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Such is the message from the massive document drop the Federal Reserve made last week. The Dodd-Frank law forced the Fed to disclose the recipients of $3.3 trillion from emergency lending programs put in place during the crisis days of 2008, so the taxpayers who paid for those rescue efforts now know whom they were helping.
Not that we should expect to receive any thank-you notes from these institutions for rescuing them from themselves.
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The Federal Reserve made $9 trillion in overnight loans to major banks and Wall Street firms during the financial crisis, according to newly revealed data released Wednesday.
The loans were made through a special loan program set up by the Fed in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse in March 2008 to keep the nation’s bond markets trading normally.
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There is one problem, however. Basel may have asked the right question, but it did not come up with the right answers, mainly because it allows banks to remain dangerously leveraged, setting equity requirements way too low. This fact is not understood because the debate on capital regulation has been mired with a cloud of confusion, and filled with un-substantiated assertions by bankers and others. As a result, the issues appear much more mysterious and complicated than they actually are.
After a massive and incredibly costly financial crisis, we seem to have financial system that is a more consolidated, more powerful, more profitable and, yes, as fragile and dangerous as we had before the crisis. How did this happen and what can we do?
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President Barack Obama on Saturday praised a newly sealed trade deal with South Korea as a landmark agreement that promises to boost the domestic auto industry and support tens of thousands of American jobs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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But that hasn’t stopped the Right from propagating the myth that the failures of “socialism” forced them to embrace capitalism.
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Last week, when the American League of Lobbyists announced a new PR offensive to help change the public perception of the profession, including this video, we just couldn’t contain ourselves. Their Lobbying-as-American-as-Mom-and-Apple-Pie PR effort deserved a classic Internet video mashup – one, that in Sunlight-style involves “data jamming” – telling the real story of how lobbyists work to control the Washington agenda…
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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WikiLeaks has become the symbol of disturbing information that can’t be stopped. Recent declarations and actions against the organization clearly expose the will of governments to control the Internet. From now on, it seems that both sides are fighting a battle that could be one of the most important that we must wage for the future of our democracies. On one side, those who would like to put the Internet under control, through administrative or privatized censorship, in order to remain in power. On the other, citizens of the word at large ready build networked societies in which the sharing of knowledge, freedom of expression and the increased transparency allowed for by the Internet must be protected and strengthened at all costs.
It is essential to debate about how the leak of the diplomatic cables is organized, drop by drop, by WikiLeaks, and about the security of the individuals mentioned in the documents, in particular to be able to detect the false rhetorics being spread about them: The cables weren’t “stolen” by WikiLeaks. It received them like newsrooms usually receive anonymous brown paper envelopes full of documents. It also sought to minimize the harm to innocents’ lives through the erasure of their names prior to publication.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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New Zealand is one of several countries currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a regional trade deal that the U.S. would like to see include a major chapter on intellectual property (Canada has been excluded from the talks). A new leak [PDF] of the New Zealand government’s position on the IP chapter is revealing on several levels, most notably for its criticism of the WIPO Internet treaties and the attempts to limit existing flexibilities on digital locks. According to the leaked document:
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Comcast customers in Illinois and three other nearby states lost their Internet access last night, apparently due to the same problem that took down service for East Coast customers just a week ago.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In the April 2010 issue of SCRIPTed, there is a very interesting article by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe entitled “The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing“.
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Counterfeit Culture is one of my favourite chapters. It includes an unforgettable scene about Bernie who is managing the China business for Johnson Carter and wants a breakdown of the ingredients King Chemical uses when it is manufacturing their soaps and shampoos and Sister, who is the co-owner of King Chemical: “Sister said that she was not compelled to provide a breakdown. The details were their trade secrets, she insisted.
This infuriated Bernie. “The product line came from my sample set. What trade secret? It’s my fucking product!”
Mr Midler dryly determined: “the factory was claiming intellectual property rights over its copying methods.”
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Copyrights
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As you may have read, the US government “seized” a bunch of domain names that were hosting sites allegedly involved in piracy and counterfeit goods over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Over 80 domains, all of them in the .com namespace, had their DNS settings reconfigured to point them to a scary-looking notice from the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE division.
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One reason is compatibility. My primary goals include being used in soundtracks and mashups, so I needed licensing that allowed my work to be incorporated into as many other works as possible. Public domain is the only universal. The only license for creative works that is used widely enough to be considered a standard is a Creative Commons non-commercial license (like this one), but they are deliberately incompatible with many works.
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In addition to changing their default licensing policy from CC BY-NC to CC BY, the University of Michigan has enabled even greater sharing and reuse by releasing more than half a million bibliographic records into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication. Following on the heels of the British Library, who just released three million bibliographic records into the public domain, the University of Michigan Library has offered their Open Access bibliographic records for download, which, as of November 17, 2010, contains 684,597 records.
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I’m delighted to introduce Andrew Rens, one of our exceptional CC Superheroes, who will tell you in his own words why he supports Creative Commons and why you should too. Rens, the founding legal lead of Creative Commons South Africa – a volunteer position he held from 2003 to 2009 – possesses particularly adept superpowers when it comes to facing tough issues around intellectual property and education in Africa. Here is his story.
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As part of an investigation running for more than a year, police in Iceland have been trying to track down individuals who run file-sharing sites and those who added large amounts of content to them. This week, teenagers as young as 15 had quite a surprise when police raided several locations across the country.
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The US “IP Czar,” Victoria Espinel, said at a conference this week that Homeland Security’s seizure of a bunch of domain names was apparently just the beginning of a larger plan to go after such folks. Espinel has been making the rounds over the past few months, working to get various companies to voluntarily start censoring websites in this manner, even without the COICA bill being in place. This isn’t really a surprise. Espinel has stated in the past that her job is to focus on the enforcement side of copyright law, so it’s no surprise she’s supportive of such seizures.
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BT today told the press that Ministry of Sound have abandoned their attempts to get the details of thousands of alleged filesharers under a “Norwich Pharmacal Order” (NPO).
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Kroes is calling for two very important reforms. The first is pan-EU copyright licenses. This would allow simpler trade in legitimate copyright works. iTunes, for example, has never provided services to many EU states, because getting licenses is too complicated.
The second reform is about allowing the use of the vast swathes of music, books, films and photos where the copyright owners have long since disappeared, generally because they have died, and it is unclear where their relatives might be. These are called “orphan works”. While the best solution would be shorter copyright terms, there are other possible solutions.
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You may recall, a couple of years back, the Associated Press got a ton of negative attention for threatening bloggers who “quote too much” of AP articles. Soon after that, we were among those who noticed that the AP had a deal with a company called iCopyright, which seemed to suggest that “fair use” quotes were limited to four words or less. After that, rates started at $12.50 to quote five words. The AP later came out and said that this was entirely different, but to this date has never adequately explained when its deal with iCopyright applies and when it does not. This got some attention earlier this year, when the cheeky folks at Woot mocked the AP over this after the AP quoted Woot’s CEO from his blog. Separately, some others noticed that the iCopyright system on the AP’s site was so screwed up that you could just put in any text you wanted and “license” it — even if it wasn’t the AP’s to license.
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ACTA
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You can request legal access to ACTA related documents from the Council. Either documents are available through the register or for the confidential ones just fill out a form with your address and mention the requested document numbers. The Council will either enable public access to the documents and sent you a pdf or deny your request and state reasons for that or they sent you a crippled, a redacted version. If your request is refused you can file a confirmatory application and when that is denied again, you can go to court or complain at the EU ombudsman. In the case of ACTA the confidentiality at the Council was so rigid. Many first applications were rejected which is quite unusual.
Inside Wikileaks – UK
Credit: TinyOgg
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12.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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In the third annual report about Linux kernel authorship by Linux Foundation, a number of interesting statistics popped up. Among the most important statistics is the one showing the level of contributions from different entities that include big corporates and individuals.
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Graphics Stack
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Apple’s Jeremy Huddleston has announced the second release candidate for the forthcoming X.Org Server 1.9.3 point release. This point release in the stable 1.9 series delivers on more bug-fixes, with a handful of them for Apple’s XQuartz, which is important especially as it looks the 1.9 series will be used by Mac OS X 10.7.
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Intel’s Keith Packard wrote a few emails to the X.Org developers over the night commenting on his per-CRTC pixmap implementation for RandR 1.4 in xorg-server 1.10. For those unfamiliar, this support basically provies, “multiple scan-out buffers which applications can create and assign to arbitrary collections of CRTCs. These pixmaps can be associated with a window for use with OpenGL or drawn to directly.” This feature really becomes useful when dealing with display setups where the screen layout exceeds the maximum size of the rendering/scan-out engines, provides the abilities for integrating compositing and project transformation into one step, and eliminating visual artifacts during screen rotation.
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Red Hat’s Owen Taylor started out by asking about a broad overview on NVIDIA’s Fence Sync, seeing as he is the maintainer of Mutter, the GNOME 3.0 compositing window manager that uses Clutter. “There’s already a lot of magic voodoo dances around both Damage and Texture-From-Pixmap, what extra incantations does this add to the picture?” Owen further noted, “I can understand each individual step of the magic voodoo dance, but when I go away from the individual problems and come back 6 months later, I have to work it all out again. And there’s a strong sense that only particular code paths that actually are in use are tested and anything else probably doesn’t work, at least on some drivers.”
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We have sent over an email to NVIDIA to try to get more information on this new driver architecture. Seeing as NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux driver shares a common code-base with their Windows driver and also their FreeBSD/Solaris support, it does lead us to believe that such a new architecture would continue to be shared across all platforms.
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Applications
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Starting with version 1.1, “Muon” is now the “Muon Package Management Suite”. (Don’t worry, I won’t try everybody try to say that for the sake of branding 
) The Muon suite is made up of the following components:
* The Muon Package Manager. (Which has heretofore been called “Muon”) Its focus has been and will remain hardcore package management with a sane GUI.
* The Muon Updater, an update manager
* Finally and with grand introduction, The Muon Software Center.
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There are quite a few GUIs for FFmpeg out there, but I’ve found Sinthgunt to be the easiest to use – it requires just 3 clicks to convert a video: select the video, select the preset to which you want to convert to, and click “Convert”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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With Natty Alpha 1 out in the wild with Compiz based Unity on the desktop, I want to see a change in our priorities for a while which I think will be super-beneficial to refocus on a point that has always plagued Compiz – Stability.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Clementine, the Qt port of Amarok 1.4 got a huge list of new features in the latest 0.6 release candidate version.
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A release candidate for Clementine 0.6 is now available for testing and it’s certainly one of the most ripened releases for a while!
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GNOME Desktop
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Because Zeitgeist itself is merely a back end for indexing data, it can’t be “seen.”
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Xfce
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It was barely a month ago that the first development snapshot of Xfce 4.8 arrived, but being released this Sunday is the second preview release of the forthcoming Xfce 4.8 desktop, expected to go gold in January.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The recent article about Fedora moving to Unity is a good example. The author very well understands the title to be nowhere near accurate and yet persists on it even though all the comments so far have pointed out this problem. Calling it a blog does not excuse one for a professional stand point to write crap.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Just in time for the holidays; your guide to giving away computers with Ubuntu and Edubuntu or your favorite *buntu. In the past few weeks I’ve been contacted by several organisations who are giving away computers pre-loaded with different versions of Ubuntu. Their stories need to be shared as they are doing some amazing work built upon all your great work in Ubuntu. So here’s a quick guide to how you can help spread Ubuntu and really make a difference in people’s lives all over the world.
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Linaro is important because it is not simply a software project but also a hardware one. With major players such as ARM on-board Linaro is also looking at creating hardware platforms optimised for a Linux operating system. ARM is a key player in the mobile computing space, to date being most active in the mobile phone sector but rapidly moving into the larger-form factor tablet and netbook market.
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A rather small crowd of researchers, kernel developers and industry experts found their way to the 12th Real-Time Linux WorkShop (RTLWS) hosted at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. The small showing was not a big surprise, but it also did not make the workshop any less interesting.
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Events
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Less than two weeks left for SCALE Call for Papers; Sponsors start lining up for event. As everyone’s sights are set on the December holidays, the Southern California Linux Expo reminds those who plan to submit papers for SCALE 9X to get them in before the deadline, which is a little over a week away. The deadline for the SCALE 9x Call for Papers is Dec. 13, with notification of acceptance being sent to speakers by Dec. 27.
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Web Browsers
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Just in time for the holidays, the Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (December 2nd) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 8.0.552.215 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.
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Previously only available in the Beta channel, Google has released version 8 of the Chrome web browser into the stable channel. This major update is the first version capable of using the upcoming web store and includes a built-in PDF viewer that’s sandboxed to help prevent attackers from exploiting security vulnerabilities in the plug-in. A sandboxed Adobe Flash Player plug-in has been integrated into the Development (Dev) channel version of the browser, so that too should appear in the stable release in due time.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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I HAD worries that GNU Octave would not support some of the advanced graphing functionality of MATLAB, but with the help of tools like gnuplot, Octave stays on par in this game (bar some OpenGL enhancements). Much to my surprise, the 3-D charting and graphing software in GNU Octave. Here are some visualisations of cardiac images I work with.
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Project Releases
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The first release candidate of OpenOffice.org fork LibreOffice has been made available for download.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Folks, interesting article by Rebecca Fernandez on open access scientific magazines. I have listed the links from the article below…
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Standards/Consortia
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The OASIS ODF Technical Committee voted a couple of weeks ago to create a new subcommittee, on “Advanced Document Collaboration”. Robin LaFontaine, from DeltaXML will chair the subcommittee.
Since the entire ODF TC is quite large now (almost 20 active members attend each meeting) it is impossible to do a technical “deep dive” on every topic in our meetings. So when a particular specification domain requires sustained attention for a period of time, we can create a subcommittee, to allow interested TC members to study and draft specification enhancements. We’ve done this several times before. For example, the Accessibility SC developed the accessibility enhancements for ODF 1.1. And the Formula and Metadata subcommittees drafted those key parts of ODF 1.2. I hope that this new SC will be equally successful in their work.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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While most traditional political parties are wary of supporting the actions of whistleblower site Wikileaks, Pirate Parties around the world have made it very clear whose side they are on. Just before the weekend Wikileaks moved to a Pirate Party owned domain, and today a conglomerate of Pirate Parties have just announced that they are now providing the site with several much needed mirror servers.
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TODAY I decided to step up with my support of Wikileaks, which I perceive as a test case for free speech and Internet freedom regardless or irrespective of the impact of what they are doing.
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I’m (was?) a Twitter user. This past week I found it utterly weird that none of the words #wikileaks, #cablegate, #cables, #Assange were actually “trending”. I even tweeted about this 5 days ago. Today, my fears of secret censorship are coming true. It appears that Twitter is censoring all these words, so they don’t appear in the (much-used) Twitter “trends” list.
It has done so for a whole week, and continues to do so. The only related trend today that currently trends in a few countries is the much less popular #imwikileaks, which shows us that Twitter’s filter engine simply hasn’t added that keyword too in their filter, YET!
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To those looking for a response in advance of this, I will simply reiterate the two points of our core values that are particularly germane to the matter: first, we support open government, which is certainly an end furthered by WikiLeaks’ actions, but we also believe in the importance of protecting individual privacy, which has been compromised by a number of releases to date. Reconciling these two positions, already somewhat at odds, with the question of WikiLeaks will be the task of our membership in the days to come.
Finally, allow me to apologize for the lack of promptness in this regard. Democracy, as you are no doubt aware, is a horrendously inefficient system of governance, but it is the only one that can achieve worthwhile results.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesman says Tom Flanagan’s remarks that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be assassinated are “simply not acceptable,” even if they weren’t serious.
Dimitri Soudas commented Friday after Assange said the prime minister’s former adviser and others “should be charged with incitement to commit murder.”
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Julian Assange is being investigated by Australian police to establish whether he has broken any of the country’s laws and is liable to prosecution there, foreign minister Kevin Rudd said today.
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…Julian Assange has almost certainly committed no crime under Australian law in relation to his involvement in Wikileaks.
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Agenzia Habeshia, EveryOne Group, Human Rights Concern Eritrea and Christian Solidarity Worldwide today sent a joint appeal to the UN, the EU, the British, the Italian and the Egyptian governments for urgent intervention in the plight of refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia who are currently held hostage in the Sinai Desert by Bedouin people traffickers.
Hundreds of refugees from the Horn of Africa have been held for months on the outskirts of a town in Sinai in purpose-built containers, where people traffickers are demanding payment of up to US$8,000 per person for their release, though the hostages had already paid US$2,000 for passage to Israel.
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On Thursday 2 December 2010 the papers were filed at Court for an application for an appeal of my client Paul Chambers to the High Court. In a perhaps ironic twist, the receiving court – Doncaster Crown Court – was closed because of snow.
The appeal is formally called an “Appeal by Case Stated”. These are appeals to the High Court on points of law. The Court will now have 21 days to consider the application: the decision should be just before Christmas. If granted, then there will be a High Court hearing early in the new year. However, if the application is not successful, then Paul has the option of a judicial review of that refusal, where the High Court can order that permision be granted.
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The past week has seen plenty of ink spilled — virtual and otherwise — about WikiLeaks and its mercurial front-man, Julian Assange, and the pressure they have come under from the U.S. government and companies such as Amazon and PayPal, both of which have blocked WikiLeaks from using their services. Why should we care about any of this? Because more than anything else, WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and that makes this a freedom of the press issue. Like it or not, WikiLeaks is fundamentally a journalistic entity, and as such it deserves our protection.
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Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks — and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
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You see, this is the first time anything like Wikileaks has been attempted. Yes, there have been leaks prior to this, but never before have hyperdistribution and cryptoanarchism come to the service of the whistleblower. This is a new thing, and as well thought out as Wikileaks might be, it isn’t perfect. How could it be? It’s untried, and untested. Or was. Now that contact with the enemy has been made – the state with all its powers – it has become clear where Wikileaks has been found wanting. Wikileaks needs a distributed network of servers that are too broad and too diffuse to be attacked. Wikileaks needs an alternative to the Domain Name Service. And Wikileaks needs a funding mechanism which can not be choked off by the actions of any other actor.
We’ve been here before. This is 1999, the company is Napster, and the angry party is the recording industry. It took them a while to strangle the beast, but they did finally manage to choke all the life out of it – for all the good it did them. Within days after the death of Napster, Gnutella came around, and righted all the wrongs of Napster: decentralized where Napster was centralized; pervasive and increasingly invisible. Gnutella created the ‘darknet’ for filesharing which has permanently crippled the recording and film industries. The failure of Napster was the blueprint for Gnutella.
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Some of our users might know that we have been accepting donations to support us in developing TortoiseSVN for a few years now. We used PayPal to achieve this, as do many other open source projects and even some closed source but free-of-cost projects.
Even the biggest hoster of open source projects, sourceforge.net, has a special feature built into their project pages where every project can activate such “donate” buttons, and that too is handled by PayPal.
Now imagine my surprise when I got an email from PayPal last Wednesday with the subject “PayPal appeal denied”. Because I never had to appeal anything with my PayPal account. Reading through that email I discovered that my account was blocked because they’ve decided that I’m not allowed to receive donations.
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The German man in question, Khaled El-Masri, was an innocent who had a misfortune to have the same name as a terrorist suspect. He was illegally kidnapped, imprisoned in Afghanistan, interrogated and tortured.
For over a year. His family had no idea what had happened to him. He had no chance to defend himself, to seek legal representation, every human right he had was taken from him. He had to go on a hunger strike for 27 days before he was able to force a meeting with a prison official and a CIA official. And this was taking place after they’d already found out that his passport was genuine and that he was innocent.
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American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash in which individuals are redirecting parts of their own sites to its Swedish internet host.
Since early on Friday morning, it has been impossible to reach WikiLeaks by typing wikileaks.org into a web browser because everyDNS, which would redirect queries for the string “wikileaks.org” to that machine address, removed its support for Wikileaks, claiming that it had broken its terms of service by being the target of a huge hacker attack.
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The campaign against WikiLeaks is a clear move to censor political material on the Internet and, potentially, on other media. The first moves made by lawmakers such as Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, have no legal foundation and yet have succeeded with Amazon and PayPal. What has followed is shockingly repressive and obscurantist. The Library of Congress blocked access to WikiLeaks across its computer systems, including reading rooms, and Columbia University students aspiring for diplomatic careers have been advised not to comment on, or link to, the whistleblower website’s revelations. It is doubly tragic that such concerted attacks are securing support from countries with a progressive legacy such as France. The intolerant response to WikiLeaks is a potential threat to all media and must be fought. Senator Lieberman and other lawmakers have introduced legislation that proposes to make the publication of an intelligence source a federal crime. Already, U.S. law allows the shutting down of some Internet domains managed in that country on grounds of infringement of copyright. The threat to the publication of inconvenient material, even with responsible redactions, is all too real.
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A British MP whose parliamentary aide was arrested over claims she is a Russian spy has challenged the security services to “prove their point now”.
Lib Dem Mike Hancock said Katia Zatuliveter, 25, had nothing to hide, he backed her 100%, and would appeal.
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It is a witch-hunt against Wikileaks, while largely ignoring the content of what was exposed.
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WikiLeaks is a website started by freedom-of-information activist and former hacker Julian Assange. On November 28, WikiLeaks sent a massive cache of government documents to five news organizations. You can’t see the leaks on its own site at the moment, as it’s currently suffering from a massive denial of service attack that has the site closed for business at the moment, although there is a mirror site in Switzerland where you can see the “Cablegate” documents. These documents are diplomatic cables that Private First Class Bradley Manning downloaded at an army base in Iraq between November 2009 and April 2010. Manning then passed them on to Assange.
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As of late afternoon, wikileaks.ch was freely accessible to UAE consumers using etisalat lines. Earlier in the day, users reported browser inconsistencies, with the site available to those using Firefox but not to those using Internet Explorer.
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A B.C. lawyer has filed a complaint with the Vancouver police, urging them to investigate whether Tom Flanagan, a former campaign manager for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, broke the law when he said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be assassinated.
Gail Davidson, a co-founder of the group Lawyers Against the War, wrote in the complaint that, on Nov. 30, Flanagan “counselled and/or incited the assassination of Julian Assange contrary to the Criminal Code of Canada,” while commenting on the CBC program Power & Politics.
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Twitter, the very popular 140 character social networking site, has a feature called “Trends” and is supposed to capture what the most popular topics of discussion are, at any given time. When people “Tweet” about a given topic, they can insert what is called a hash tag into their Tweet. For example, if I wanted to Tweet about Richard Feynman, and I wanted other people interested in Richard Feynman to be able to find it, I could put something like “#Feynman” within my post. Twitter would then automatically categorize this post under “Feynman” and voila, people can search for it on Twitter. This is how “Trends” are calculated. If say, within a given time span of perhaps 10 minutes, a million people put the tag #Christmas into their tweets, and this would be a very popular Twitter topic and should make it into the “Trends” list. Simple enough.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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So-called Flash cookies—chunks of data embedded in the Adobe Flash Player on internet users’ browsers that can’t be eliminated with standard privacy controls—have been on the radar of privacy advocates since last year. But the FTC made it clear today that it’s now starting to take a more active role in addressing what it referred to as the “Flash problem.”
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Tomorrow I’ll travel by land, sea and air the length of Canada to sit in a room full of strangers.
One of them, a man named Wayne Crookes, wants me to pay him what will be, if he gets his way, an inordinate amount of money for something I haven’t done.
Others of them, a panel of legal experts chosen for their wisdom and knowledge of Canada’s archaic defamation laws, will decide if that’s going to happen.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Two acquisitions in as many days? Say it ain’t so! Prior to even unboxing Phonetic Arts, Google has now snapped up Seattle-based Widevine.
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I heard about the new .WWF format this morning. It is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund to prevent people printing .PDF files. As a matter of fact, it is an encrypted .PDF format with the “printing” flag disabled.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Those who wish to justify copyright as something more or other than an intrusion into the rights of owners of things must then advance an account of the objects of copyright, and in doing so explain how such an account can make sense in one or more of the accounts of ideas and things so far advanced. To date they have failed to do so.
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Viacom would like the court to carve out an exception to the DMCA, essentially reinterpreting the law so that YouTube no longer qualifies for the DMCA’s safe harbor immunity. It’s, to me, a really dangerous document, in that it suggest in effect a system whereby fair use is technically impossible or so difficult and expensive to make use of that no average guy will do so. It argues that YouTube’s refusal to implement a technology-based filtering system Viacom likes, Audible Magic, to prescreen uploaded video places YouTube outside the protection of the DMCA. It also argues that you can be guilty of direct infringement if you benefit financially from infringement, even if you don’t specifically know it’s happening.
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Joi Ito, 44, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist with a particular interest in the world wide web, was an early investor in Twitter, Technorati, Flickr and Last.fm. He grew up in Japan and the US; he once owned a nightclub in Tokyo and worked as a DJ in Chicago. Time magazine hailed him as a member of the “cyber-elite” in 1997 and two years ago Businessweek named him “one of the 25 most influential people on the web”. Ito has a special interest in issues of copyright in the digital sphere and is CEO of the organisation Creative Commons. He is now based in Dubai.
Sony Ericsson ZEUS – Z1-PlayStation Phone (spy)
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 1:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New signs that Microsoft’s sheer aggression with unnamed patents against Linux (threats of lawsuits) is not a thing of the past but a plan for the future
MICROSOFT SOFTENS unspeakable acts of racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] using euphemisms like “respecting intellectual property” (it’s neither to do with respect nor about intellect and physical property). The lawyers who keep bullying distributors of Linux and Android (reportedly Chrome OS too) are trying to make it look amicable for PR reasons. As this recent article puts it, “HTC has also been pressured into” a patent deal (involving Linux) with Microsoft just shortly before surrendering to Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft’s special patent troll. It’s an extortion by “Club Microsoft” and Electronista says:
HTC has also been pressured into a licensing deal with Microsoft for Android-related patents that Microsoft allegedly owns but which won’t be tested in court until Motorola defends itself.
Well, as we mentioned the other day, Murdoch’s press (and its technology equivalent) continues to spew Microsoft patent propaganda from all sorts of sites and controversial Microsoft boosters like Paul Thurrott join the FUDfest. Microsoft-affiliated companies and trolls are also taking a shot at Android. An Android-based Huawei phone, for example, has just been sued by a patent troll called Helferich Patent Licensing, LLC.
Ina/Ian Fried, who recently joined AllThingsD (Murdoch site) to promote Microsoft, says in the headline that “Microsoft’s Plan B to Make Money in Phones: Patents” (that’s after having a jolly good time with Microsoft’s Smith). Recall what Microsoft recently did with Acacia and ACCESS [1, 2, 3, 4], which holds patents on mobile software/hardware.
“Recall what Microsoft recently did with Acacia and ACCESS, which holds patents on mobile software/hardware.”In other patent news, laws are being disrupted and rewritten to suit those who exploit counter-productive laws. As we showed 2 days ago, Microsoft is actively involved in this (also translated into Spanish) because it hires lobbyists to legalise software patents in all countries. An Israeli blog about patents potentially implies that there is an opportunity to sneak in a pro-Microsoft “fox” [1, 2] who will be more open to software patents in Israel and another notorious writer leads the patent lawyers lobbying for software patents in a blog. Yes, Steve Lundberg, a software patents booster who was celebrating the abduction of a country's law regarding software patents, is still at it in his blog. What a bunch of self-serving folks who contribute nothing but litigation and paperwork. There are other patent lawyer types who try to justify patenting software for personal financial reasons and not for scientific reasons. It is quite saddening also to see this coverage from Patently-O, a beehive of patent lawyers. Daniel Ravicher from the SFLC (now the Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law) is optimistic about SCOTUS planning to revisit software/BM patents, as hoped. In the Huff & Puff he writes:
Patent attorneys are generally too corrupted by being in favor of expansive patent policy (because that makes their services more valuable) and/or too fearful of retaliation to decry the CAFC and its practice of judicial activism. For better or worse, the net result has been that the Supreme Court has had to repeatedly step in and slap down the CAFC when its expansionist policy has gone too far. Cases like eBay, MedImmune, KSR, Quanta and many others from the 2000′s are all examples of the Supreme Court having to take time away from other important issues of social policy to reverse the CAFC’s judicially activist opinions (often unanimously). This is the right result, but not the most efficient process for society. So, it is with only slight satisfaction that I report the Supreme Court yesterday accepted another patent case. This is another instance where the CAFC went far beyond merely interpreting the patent statute in order to benefit patentees and harm the public. I am confident it will be another instance where the Supreme Court will correct the CAFC.
James Love, who also occasionally writes for the Huff & Puff, recently wrote that on February 25th, 2009 “President Obama announced the appointment of Gary Locke, the former Governor of the State of Washington, as the Secretary of Commerce. When appointed, Locke was partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, and had been a consultant to Microsoft.”
Love also pointed out that: “Through its seat of the UNITAID board of directors, the Gates Foundation nominated a Microsoft patent lawyer to the founding board of the UNITAID medicines patent pool. The UNITAID board deferred action on all nominations.”
As we showed many times before, the Gates Foundation is a big patents booster. It promotes patents (monopolies) in many areas and helps Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures along the way, even very directly. Government influence is only part it. █
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