02.21.11
Posted in Deception, Marketing at 5:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New links of interest, highlighting a phenomenon to be aware of
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The latest in the long line of revelations from the HBGary Federal email leak, is that HBGary Federal wanted to create software that could make it easy for staffers to create and maintain a massive number of fake online social network personas, allowing them to control virtual armies of totally fake people, whose only mission is to spy on others and spew paid-for propaganda. But, what’s even more amazing is that not only did the emails reveal HBGary Federal employees talking about building a platform for letting people more easily manage an army of fake personas, but that the US government put out a request for exactly that kind of software last June, with its request for “Persona Management Software.”
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It looks like we should all learn Homer Simpson’s sock-puppet phobia.
If this blog post is accurate, then corporates aren’t just briefing social media teams to “manage” their reputation on services like Twitter. They’re creating armies of software-driven sock-puppets to gang up on bloggers and commenters to swamp negative comment.
The Daily Kos poster is particularly offended that HB Gary, the company that embarrassed itself by taking on “hacktivist” group Anonymous and being hacked in return, would be deploying such tactics against its critics.
The technique is based on creating a kind of meta-manager of online personae, to make sure (as the HB Gary document puts its) that the person hired to massage their employers’ online reputation doesn’t “accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use”.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Google, Microsoft, Search at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Picture by Zil
Summary: Amidst allegations and reports that Fox misleads the public on purpose [1], a close look is taken at GOP agenda [2, 3] and the probable reason for the anti-Google vendetta
Yesterday we wrote about Murdoch's role in Microsoft's ruthless fight against Google. Murdoch’s role in it goes a long way back [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14] and it’s no secret that Murdoch meets Gates when he hangs out with Microsoft executives and other billionaires like himself, including those who distort the record about climate science and those who run PR/investment operations disguised as a charity (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett). A reader informed us that Glenn Beck’s recent anti-Google rhetoric may have something to do with his boss, Rupert Murdoch. There is also this new article about it in alternet.org — an article which is summarised as follows:
Beck has a Google conspiracy theory. What he doesn’t tell you is that his boss, Rupert Murdoch, has it in for the search-engine giant.
Microsoft has already destroyed Yahoo! and it then took its search userbase. It’s a bit like Nokia; Microsoft would rather destroy companies and take their market share because it cannot create something better. History is full of many examples like this, e.g. Borland, WordPerfect, Netscape. Yahoo! keeps sacking employees just like Nokia in the post-Elop era [1, 2, 3, 4].
Truthfully, we do not endorse Google for its proprietary search services, but for those who do not trust Google, here is another decent option:
Do you want a better, more secure, more private search engine? Give Duckduckgo a try. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for several months now. It’s great. Also, their !Bang feature is awesome and extremely useful.
I tried it earlier this year and I was pleased. But it would be nice to have a truly free/libre algorithm on which to build and combine many search engines of a vast scale. What we have today is insufficient. █
References from the latest news:
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The Federal Communications Commission is investigating News Corp.’s Fox to determine if the company misled the regulatory agency with regards to the operations of its television station WWOR-TV in Seacaucus, N.J.
In a letter sent to Fox on Thursday, the FCC said it needs to determine if Fox and WWOR intentionally provided “material factual information that was incorrect” or is guilty of “intentionally omitting material information.”
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I read with profound weariness a piece in Salon by Michael Lind entitled Hey, liberals: Time to give the Beck bashing a rest. Lind is apparently under the impression that (a) Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews engage in “constant mockery” of bloviating right-wing demagogues such as Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck, and that (b) this would somehow be a bad thing, because it is likely to backfire on “liberals.”
He could not be more wrong.
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The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.
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02.20.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The VitalQIP 1200 is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and is also available as a software appliance.
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Desktop
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So, they are all using FLOSS apps and about half the departments are using GNU/Linux. Slowly but surely, the promised migration is happening. The migration project has been extended to 2013 with no additional funds required.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Ballnux
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Lots of mobile manufacturers are finding a comfortable home with Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) open source mobile platform, but as the world’s second most prolific maker of phones, Samsung’s devotion is especially noteworthy.
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Based on an anonymous post on the XDA Developer Forums, the reason behind the lack of a Froyo update for Samsung Galaxy S phones in the US appears to be because Samsung is greedy.
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Applications
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Fotoxx is an open source and freely available photo editing tool similar to Gimp. Its extremely light weight when compared to its more famous peers. With its current version 11.02, it is packed with some pretty cool features despite its small size.
Fotoxx is pretty feature rich. It can also act as a nifty little image collection management tool. Some of its features include exploring and navigating images using Thumbnail browser, importing camera raw files, 16-bit color editing, saving images in TIFF -8/16, PNG and JPG file formats with variable compressions.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Wind and Water : Puzzle Battles is one of the most addictive puzzle games made by an independent game development company Yuan Works.
The game features an RPG style story mode with unique challenging sets of puzzles and hand drawn 2D pixel art graphics. W ‘n’ W has received great reviews from many websites and has been featured in lots of magazines. The game was initially developed for Korean hand-held GP2X and was later ported to Dreamcast.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Indian KDE Community is organizing its maiden conference – conf.kde.in in Bangalore on 9th, 10th and 11th March followed by a two day code sprint on 12th and 13th.
conf.kde.in will provide a platform for Qt and KDE contributors and enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn, play, have fun and create limitless possibilities.
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Here’s what happens with me. I have 4 virtual desktops, as you saw above. They are named main, chatting, coding, and web. Main holds Kontact and Amarok. Chatting has Kopete, Choqok, and Konversation. Coding either has Blender, Inkscape and Dolphn or Kate and Konsole. Web holds my web browser. So when I start up my computer, I need to start all these up. I could leave them all open when I logout and let KDE save that as a session. But that means KDE is sluggish to start up as it starts up all those programs. And if all I want is to listen to some music, I have to wait an unreasonable amount of time. What activities will allow me to do is associate those programs with an activity and whenever I start up the activity, those programs will automatically load. So on a day I’m not working on INM (http://www.notmadcomic.com), I don’t load the Blender activity. Same goes with coding. But when I *do* want to work on a new comic strip, I just load up the Blender activity and it will auto-load blender, Dolphin (to the right subfolder), and inkscape. When I’m done, I just close the activity.
Whether this turns out to be awesome in practice depends on how annoying it is to switch activities vs how annoying it is to switch virtual desktops. Virtual desktops work well enough for me that the benefits aren’t worth it if it becomes more annoying to get to what I want to do. I can’t try it just yet – as I write this (it will be published about a week later) Fedora doesn’t have KDE 4.6, but I’m definitely excited about trying this new workflow.
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Debian Family
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Freescale Semiconductor announced a Linux-ready system-on-chip family for femtocell and picocell 4G base stations. The QorIQ Qonverge SoCs combine a Power-PC core for the PSC9130/31 femtocell version — or dual cores for the PSC9132 picocell model — as well as one or two Freescale StarCore DSP cores, a Maple baseband accelerator, and other accelerators that create a scalable “base station-on-chip.”
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Phones
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Android
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Is the long-rumored Google music service imminent? It appears that way, according to statements made by Motorola Mobilitiy CEO Sanjay Jha.
Jha told reporters at Mobile World Congress that the tablet-optimized Android OS, Honeycomb, will include a Google music tie-in. Motorola’s Android tablet Xoom is expected to launch this spring and will be the first to ship with Android 3.0, dubbed Honeycomb.
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Tablets
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Events
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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I’ve just uploaded the slide for my talk during FOSDEM 2011 here. It was very nice to be able to talk about our somewhat ambitious plan to bring LibreOffice Calc to the next level. Also, I regret that I haven’t been able to blog about what’s been going on lately; lots of time spent on writing, reviewing code, fixing bugs and integrating patches, and sadly little time is left on writing blogs.
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Education
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Elizabeth Jackson is different from other 17-year-olds.
“Most kids are like, ‘Ooh, a computer! I can go on Facebook,’ ” the Ligonier Valley junior said. “They don’t think, ‘What a cool piece of technology!’”
Jackson, on the other hand, has long been interested in how technology works.
“I always liked pulling things apart, taking apart remote controls,” she said.
Today, she is studying mechatronics, a combination of mechanical and electronic engineering, at the Eastern Westmoreland Career and Technology Center in Derry Township. The class is centered around building and programming robots, and students graduate with knowledge of computer hardware, software and programming languages.
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“It’s not only important for a student to learn to write a letter in Microsoft Word,” Sudol-DeLyser said, explaining that every student should learn about basic computer security, media production and simple programming, and interested students should be encouraged to study computer science in depth.
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Business
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Simon Phipps, Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock, answered few questions about ForgeRock’s story and business trategy.
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Licensing
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I’ve been looking with great interest OpenKinect, an open source project that in its own words is an “open community of people interested in making use of the amazing Xbox Kinect hardware with our PCs and other devices. We are working on free, open source libraries that will enable the Kinect to be used with Windows, Linux, and Mac.” The Kinect is indeed a revolution in human-computer interface, much like the Wii was a revolution in how people interact with video-games. I have been tempted to get an Xbox just to try out the wonderful hardware.
OpenKinect is trying to use this amazing hardware to create interfaces for other applications. As soon as I heard about this, my lawyerly sixth sense started flashing warning signs. Is Microsoft on-board with this? Is there a licence? Are the OpenKinect developers opening themselves to future lawsuits and licensing fee claims from Redmond’s finest Men in Black?
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Science
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The final line-up of teams competing for the $30 million (£18.5m) robotic Moon-explorer prize has been confirmed.
The prize will go to the builders of the first robot to send back video as it travels over 500 metres of the Moon’s surface.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Coca Cola Company recently announced the launch of its fourth annual Diet Coke “Women’s Heart Health” campaign to “raise awareness and funds for women’s heart health education and research.” Similar to what Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) and Mike’s Hard Lemonade did with the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer campaign last year, Diet Coke is this year pretending to advance the cause of improving women’s heart health via a chemical-laden soft drink that is literally destroying the health of millions.
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House Republicans just cut off funds for abortions — and breast exams, cervical cancer screenings and STD testing
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The situation in Libya has heated up. The government of Libya has brought in African mercenaries who are ruthless. The death-toll mounts. In Bahrain, the army and police have withdrawn from the Pearl Roundabout, allowing protestors to reoccupy that area. Let us hope this is not a strategic move to create a free firing zone. Let us hope it is a move towards actual dialogue. In Yemen violence continues.
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Long before I became involved with technology I worked as a reporter in the Middle East. My work there introduced me to many important characters of that era. Some of them, like Yassar Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization and King Hussein of Jordan, are long gone from the scene. I effectively predated Mubarak, and in those days Bahrain was mainly known as the only place on the Gulf where drivers were polite and you could legally buy a drink. But one constant that remains is Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, though he’s not what this column is about. It’s about Major Jolloud, Qaddafi’s right-hand man.
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So now we have Libyan troops killing Libyan citizens in both protests and funeral processions. This is completely consistent with Major Jolloud. And it will continue until the government falls or all the protest leaders are dead. Not until the protests end — until the leaders are dead. That’s Major Jolloud’s way and the people of Libya probably know that by now.
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The wave of unrest spreading across the Middle East and North Africa is testing the underpinnings of US policy, which for decades has seen Washington side with rulers who kept a lid on dissent but provided relative geopolitical stability.
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Update: Death toll now at least 173, rights group says
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Police dispersed scores of people who gathered in central Beijing on Sunday after calls spread online across China urging pro-democracy gatherings inspired by protest rallies across the Middle East.
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North Korea is digging tunnels at a site where it has launched two nuclear tests, suggesting it is preparing a third, the South’s Yonhap news agency said on Sunday, a development which would trigger concern across the region.
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Thousands of jubilant Bahrainis returned on Saturday to Manama’s Pearl Square, the focal point of bloody anti-regime demonstrations, after police and troops withdrew in an apparently conciliatory move.
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The American who shot dead two men on a Lahore street, triggering a diplomatic crisis between Pakistan and the United States, is a CIA agent who was on assignment at the time of the incident.
Raymond Davis has been the subject of widespread speculation since he opened fire with a semi-automatic Glock pistol on the two men who had pulled up alongside his car at a red light on 25 January.
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Cablegate
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Finally! A WikiLeaks / football (soccer, to you) link! Sports Illustrated writer says he wants to run for president of FIFA, and finds maybe he is not joking. Among the weapons in his “Arsenal” (so to speak): “I would love to do a WikiLeaks on FIFA,” Wahl said. “If I’m president I’ll release all of the internal documents to the public, I’ll start an internal investigation to see if this organization really is corrupt. I think the international Olympic committee went through something like this and they have a much cleaner reputation now.”
WikiLeaks just released hundreds of new Bahrainian cables. From one of new cables on Bahrain: Head of Bahrain intelligence agency “valued contact” of US embassy.
Important piece on librarians and WikiLeaks. No, really, don’t miss it.
Special one-day sale on my Age of Wikileaks book, just $10.95 in print and $4.99 e-book.
In spirit of what I’ve been doing for awhile, Ryan Gallagher puts together long list of WikiLeaks revelations and how they’ve been covered.
As Libya revolt grows, a collection of WikiLeaks cables on LIbya, well beyond the infamous “nurse.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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This is the story of an ordinary citizen (Tim DeChristopher) taking creative peaceful direct action to disrupt, as he put it, a “fraud against the American people and a threat to (his) future.”
In December 2008, the Bush administration granted the oil and gas industry one last unethical auction in Utah, scurrying to lease out parcels of pristine red rock public lands for drilling and exploration.
Exercising his inherent right to protest, Tim who was then a local college student, walked in the building, registered as bidder 70 and went up against Big Oil and friends. He soon outbid them—winning 14 parcels in a row and racking up over $1.7 million worth of land! When asked to step aside by security, Tim made it very clear that he was there to stop the auction and was promptly escorted out.
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Last December, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) released draft regulations governing natural gas drilling in the basin. The Delaware River watershed supplies drinking water to approximately 15 million people and gets its water from four states: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. New York City’s unfiltered drinking water supply – which supplies safe water to more than 9 million New Yorkers – is fed by the Delaware River system.
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Finance
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In January, the bankers and corporate executives at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, presented a plan to create $100 trillion US dollars (about €700 billion or ¥7 trillion) in new international debt.
During the last decade, world debt nearly doubled from $57 trillion to $109 trillion. Banks created ‘toxic assets’, ‘mortgage derivatives’ and ‘default swaps’ without substantial collateral to back them up. These schemes made bankers very rich, but helped collapse the world financial system 18 months ago. Public taxpayers have since bailed these bankers out with about $11 trillion in new debt. Now the financiers want more.
As some economies slightly recovered, energy prices rose to trigger inflation, slowing real recovery. Thus, the WEF bankers published ‘More Credit, Fewer Crises’, proposing that the world double its debt once again to $210 trillion by 2020. This debt would be over three times the entire world annual economy.
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Goldman Sachs Group (GS.N) tripled Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s base salary and awarded him $12.6 million (7.9 million pounds) of stock, even after the bank’s net income plunged last year.
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Who are the government sponsored enterprises today? Which entities are too big to fail, in the eyes of lawmakers and regulators, and therefore are receiving implicit, no-cost government guarantees?
The answer is our largest bank holding companies such as JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank in terms of assets behind Bank of America Corp. This point is made in the latest quarterly report from Neil Barofsky, the special inspector-general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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What happens when the smartest man in the room (by his own estimation) proves too clever by half? What happens when a one-man band puts on a third-rate show? What happens when a “brilliant strategist” is so full of uncontrollable resentment and meanness that he keeps getting himself in trouble by interfering where he has no business?
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Privacy
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Just as the Egyptian government recently forced the Internet to go dark, U.S. officials could flip the switch if the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset legislation becomes law, say its critics.
Proponents of the bill, which is expected to be reintroduced in the current session of Congress, dismiss the detractors as ill-informed — even naive.
The ominously nicknamed Kill Switch bill is sure to be a flashpoint of discussion at the RSA Conference, the nation’s largest gathering of computer-security experts that takes place here this week.
The bill — crafted by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Tom Carper, D-Del. — aims to defend the economic infrastructure from a cyberterrorist attack. But it has free-speech advocates and privacy experts howling over the prospect of a government agency quelling the communication of hundreds of millions of people.
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The author of The Cult Of The Amateur argues that if we lose our privacy we sacrifice a fundamental part of our humanity.
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Civil Rights
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Last week, joyful images of Damian Green standing next to the remnants of our multi-million pound ID card database were met with applause from those of us who pride personal freedom and resent an over-powering state. This is a state that, in its wisdom, has deemed it within its rights (and amazingly even its responsibility on occasions) to hold data on every single British citizen, information that delved into the most personal aspects of the individual.
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Facial recognition scaAirport face-scanning robots switched offnners at Manchester Airport have been switched off after an incident in which the robot guard let a couple through the gate even though they had swapped passports.
An immigration officer stopped the couple after they got through the barrier.
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An obscure EU Committee has slammed the introduction of body scanners, raising concerns over the health and human rights risks of the technology.
The European Economic and Social Committee has delivered an opinion on scanner technology, which sets out concerns over the scanners’ ability to improve security “which, coupled with the considerable cost of the scanners, remains the key issue”.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Take the Usage Based Billing disaster – once he realized there was a problem, Tony did his homework, and moved quickly to fix it. That he took a while to realize it was a problem isn’t surprising – his remit as Industry Minister is pretty wide.
How Wikileaks REALLY Works
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in Deception, Marketing, Novell at 10:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: MSPmentor is an example of news sites or blogs that rent out space to bidders and therefore betray a higher degree of independence/trust people typically ascribe to blogs
TECHRIGHTS never received a payment from a company. It never will. It is a matter of principle and people generally know the site is about promoting ideas, not brands.
MSPmentor, part of a small media company which we mentioned here before for boosting Novell and also giving Novell a platform, is disclosing a sponsorship, but does that make up for publishing a corporate placement as ‘news’? It says at the very bottom: “Dan Dufault is global director of partner marketing at Novell. Guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.”
“The disclosure alone is not enough to make the coverage acceptable or accurate.”The owner of this site, Joe the “VAR Guy”, is a nice person whom I chatted with many times. It is saddening that journalistic integrity is compromised by a desire to make money; disclosures include sponsorships from Oracle and Novell, for example. The disclosure alone is not enough to make the coverage acceptable or accurate. There is no balance. It helps show why he has been so nice to Novell — they pay him. A few weeks ago we gave some more examples of sites that Novell pays for positive coverage. It is probably not against any specific law, but it generally ruins news and it decreases trust on the Web. Just watch what looks like another advertisement disguised as news. There is a lot of stuff like this showing up in news feeds, and clearly this is not journalism; it’s fluff like this which makes sites like Wikileaks all that crucial. Critical reporting never comes from someone reporting about his/her paymasters. That’s PR, not journalism. █
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Posted in Finance, Novell at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Financial Novell news (the very little of it which still exists)
BEFORE we come to discussing Novell’s sale, there is a need to remember that this is Novell’s last month. It will soon become property of AttachMSFT and — barring government intervention at the ninetieth minute — Microsoft too will get many of Novell’s patents.
Looking at financial news from the past two weeks, there was far less than usual about Novell and prominent among the headlines was “SHARES OF NOVELL RANK THE LOWEST IN TERMS OF EPS GROWTH IN THE SYSTEMS SOFTWARE INDUSTRY”. With this one exception, we could not find anything specific about NOVL, only collective coverage that also deals with Novell, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. This one deals with Novell in Boston. █
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Posted in Google, Novell at 9:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The journey taken by Joseph LaSala and other former staff of Novell
The departure of Novell’s Joseph LaSala (senior vice president, general counsel and secretary) was mentioned here 3 years ago [1, 2]. It happened just over a year after Novell had sold out to Microsoft and LaSala is now taking an identical role at Sapient: “With over fifteen years of experience as general counsel in many public companies, LaSala joins Sapient from Discovery Communications Inc most recently, where as general counsel he led the legal effort related to Discovery’s go-public transaction in 2008 and was advisor to the board and management team. Before Discovery he served as general counsel for enterprise software company Novell Inc.”
Marc Burrows’s career move, which was mentioned in [1, 2, 3], also reveals some Novell roots:
Marc Burrows has been promoted to the position of international marketing manager. Burrows has been with Aribex since 2006, last serving as product manager. His prior experience includes export management and trade financing. He was previously involved with international product development teams at Novell and WordPerfect.
WordPerfect under Novell goes a very long way back, just like Eric Schmidt.
The Novell roots of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt were mentioned briefly in the previous post and also in a variety of articles from the past two weeks, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. To quote just one of them:
In February 2001 they approached Novell CEO Eric Schmidt with the offer of being CEO for Google. He accepted and became both chairman and CEO, while Brin became president of products and Page president of technology.
How about going further back in time to this new post from ZDNet:
In order to pass the test, I had to gain a basic familiarity with Novell NetWare, so I got a trial copy of NetWare (I think it was 3.12) and began to experiment.
Some other news articles about Netware are omitted. Their significance is mostly historical, just like this new article about Thomas Quinn, a former Novell president:
E-Fuel is the brainchild of Thomas Quinn, a former president of the networking giant Novell (NOVL), whose last company, Gyration, developed and patented the motion controller for the Nintendo Wii. So how does his fuel system work?
Here is another move involving Ximian/Novell staff (“he has held senior marketing positions at technology companies including Ximian, Novell, Lotus/IBM, Webhire, Deltek Systems”).
Over the past few years we have shown that Novell suffered serious brain drain. █
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