09.15.11
Gemini version available ♊︎Links – Copyright Maximalists turn on Libraries, Other Horrors. Will Yang Return to Yahoo?
Reader’s Picks
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Microsoft Watch, not much going on.
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Rats jump Microsoft’s sinking ship
I’ve wondered aloud in several recent posts on various Microsoft defections, what gives? Why are folks jumping ship now (besides the oft-cited stock-vesting reasons)? One of my readers with good knowledge of Microsoft’s inner-workings had an interesting theory.
Mary Jo Foley’s handlers tried to spin this but their theory of why Microsoft executives are leaving or being let go is not convincing. A popular North West euphemism is “Fired_employee is perusing other opportunities.”
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Office 364 – M$ Charged with False Advertising
The Advertising Standards Agency is investigating M$’s claims of 99.9% availability in advertising. … It’s only Office 365 if you round up” I think it’s actually closer to 363…
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Pogson examines IDC PC myopia
2Q 2011 saw shipments of 107 million smart phones and 13.5 million tablets. I would call that “compelling”, but IDC does not count them as “PCs”. Therefor, while consumers are clamoring for more, better and cheaper smart thingies, IDC sees a serious prolonged decline in “PC” markets.
Pogson must be saying the right things and people are listening because trolls are all over his comments.
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Security
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Another Nugget from M$
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.
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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
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The US catches an actual spy.
in 2002, Nozette sent an e-mail threatening to take a classified program he was working on, “to [foreign country] or Israel and do it there selling internationally…” As a result of this and other information giving rise to suspicion of espionage, the FBI decided to conduct an undercover operation.
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US “Free Trade Treaties” don’t promote US exports according to US Government studies.
They mostly promote exploitation, Microsoft and other big publishers the way Cablegate shows the US governemt pushes these things elsewhere.
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Israel plans group punishment in the form of mass and political murder.
Israel planned an all-out attack on Gaza, and began attacking Hamas targets, as a “retaliation” for the small Eilat attack that Hamas didn’t know about, plus missile launches that Hamas tried to stop. Israel also arrested people associated with Hamas, including Palestinian parlamentarians, despite having no reason to associate them with the Eilat attack.
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Spanish police attacked harmless protesters and journalists at the protest against the expense of the pope’s visit.
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World-famous artist accuses officials of denying people their basic rights and describes Beijing as a ‘city of violence’
He describes his own frightening imprisonment, desperate migrant workers, broken courts, and the rich party bosses who run it all.
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Thugs (probably working for Assad) attacked Syria’s top cartoonist and broke his hands.
Finance
Anti-Trust
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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Copyrights
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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.
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Needs Sunlight said,
September 15, 2011 at 2:37 am
$8 million of “software” is not the same as really giving actual money. It’s dumping plain and simple.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
September 15th, 2011 at 3:06 am
It’s worse than just dumping (for lock-in). This ‘donation’ costs nothing to make. It’s just a digital copy.