Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links - Copyright Maximalists turn on Libraries, Other Horrors. Will Yang Return to Yahoo?

Reader's Picks



  • Security



    • Another Nugget from M$
      Days ahead of the patch folks all around the world have been able to take over almost any PC on a LAN running that other OS just by placing a malicious .dll on some networked storage device. The mind boggles. I can see SANs intended to share files among the group to be used to own the whole LAN.


    • Google sheds some light on Iran's involvement with the Diginotar cert incident.
      It means that somebody in Iran had gone to great lengths to intercept supposedly secure Internet traffic, including Gmail messages. ... [Iran] remains one of the few nations that would have a need to defraud Western companies in order to conduct such surveillance. Many governments, including countries with a poor reputation for defending freedom of expression or privacy, are able to generate any number of fake digital certificates on their own authority. The current dependence of secure Internet traffic on a few, potentially insecure commercial companies is a profound flaw.

      Richard Stallman notes, "I am sad to report that the Chrome browser that this was done with is nonfree software."



  • Defence/Police/Aggression





  • Finance



  • Anti-Trust



    • Yahoo co-founder urged to help oust chairman
      A major Yahoo Inc. shareholder is recruiting company co-founder Jerry Yang to join a crusade to oust Chairman Roy Bostock amid the upheaval triggered by the recent firing of CEO Carol Bartz. The shareholder, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, sought Yang's help in a letter sent Wednesday.


    • MICROSOFT DONATES $8 MILLION GRANT TO THURGOOD MARSHALL COLLEGE FUND[sic]
      Microsoft Corporation has recently announced that it will be renewing its partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund through an additional $8 million software grant. This recent grant brings the total donation amount given by the Microsoft Corporation to $29 million, and will provide software for TMCF’s 47-member network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. ...

      There may be a hardware component to this dumping/indoctrination, but the value is a tax avoidance fiction and the hardware will be a liability using the software that comes with it.





  • Censorship



    • Child Pornography Bill Makes Privacy Experts Skittish
      The bill requires all Internet service providers to save their customers' IP addresses — or online identity numbers — for a year. The bill's stated purpose is to help police find child pornographers, but critics say that's just an excuse for another step toward Big Brother.




  • Privacy

    • Massachusetts track car location by automatically scanning license plates from police cars.
      Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour.

      I'm not sure why the system would have to be in police cars and could not be operated from other cameras like the red light cameras at every major intersection. People should be concerned about those too.





  • Civil Rights



  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Returns From The Grave
      The current draft Treaty would grant exclusive, 50-year intellectual property rights to distributors of information that apply in parallel with copyright protections, even when transmitters have had no role in creating the content being transmitted.

      The treaty and article use the propaganda term Intellectual Property, and the treaty is more than an extension of copyright.



    • Copyrights



      • PJ Notes a lawsuit to prevent universities from making digital libraries, which objects even to digitization of orphaned works.
        Well, the more they try to assert their Most Holy rights, and the rights of people no one can find, the more certain I am that copyright law will end up reformed. It's like Righthaven. Or patent trolls. When people get disgusted by excessive use of the law, they decide to do something about it. Maybe it's time to go back to the prior copyright system, where you had to register your copyright to have one?

        Guardian source article intentionally not linked.







  • Comments

    Recent Techrights' Posts

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    the agenda is set GAFAM and IBM rather than donors
    SLAPP Censorship - Part 22 Out of 200: When You Complain People Impersonate You in IRC (But You Yourself Impersonate People in IRC and Lock Them Out of Their IRC Handles)
    We'll cover this with direct evidence some time soon
     
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    This notion of "legacy employees" seems like something overlapping with "expensive" (well paid) staff, even if not entirely equivalent
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    There is another strike in 5 days
    This Morning The Register MS Published Slop Promotion With the Term "AI" 15 Times In It. The Register MS Was (As Usual) Paid to Do This
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    There's a widespread stigma of lawyers being manipulative and chronically dishonest
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    Proprietary software tends to be like this
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    should we stop calling "nazi" everyone we don't agree with?
    More Threats (Including Physical Threats) Against Us Are a Dumb Move
    It's like a "hit list" (targets list) and I shall keep the police duly informed
    New Example of Pentagon in "Feminist" Clothing Inside Fake News of Publishers Paid to Promote Outsourcing to US ("Clown Computing") and American Slop
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    Hating Techrights is a Career
    but is it good for civil society?
    Dr. Stallman’s Work Will Never be Considered 'Mainstream' Because He Rejects and Works Against the So-called 'Mainstream'
    Try to be more like Stallman
    The New Layoffs: 'Silent Layoffs', 'Secret Layoffs', 'Quiet Layoffs', 'Passive Layoffs' 'Stealth Layoffs', and Unannounced Layoffs Disguised as Return-to-Office (RTO Mandates)
    The US needs to revisit and fix the WARN Act
    EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part IX - Cocaine Addicts in Charge of the EPO Attacking Families of EPO Staff
    Things like being high-profile and being a serious drug addict aren't opposites
    What Feminism in Science Means (Codes of Conduct Don't Tackle the Real Issues)
    Universality matters, more so in a project or community that's said to build the "universal operating system" (Debian)
    SLAPP Censorship - Part 21 Out of 200: It's About Behaviour Online, Not How Much Money From Shadowy Third Parties Gets Spent on Lawyers and Two Barristers
    75+ KG of legal papers, 2 cases, 2 barristers (one hiding in the metadata) and maybe two law firms (also hiding in the metadata) against two modest people in Manchester seems disproportionate and vindicative
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    Over at Tux Machines...
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    Now about 10% into this series
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    The media did not mention those layoffs
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    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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    Fear is Not a Legitimate Factor
    Smart people know that trying to prevent moral people from doing the "Right Thing" will backfire
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    Scheduled Maintenance This Coming Wednesday
    Other than that, all is the same and we carry on as usual
    Most Press Articles About IBM Are LLM Slop, Sometimes With Slop Images
    IBM basically laid off almost 1,000 people last week [...] At the moment about 75% of the 'articles' we see about IBM (in recent days) are some kind of slop
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    Over at Tux Machines...
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