11.29.11
Links – Oppose ProtectIP, pollution and anti-trust
Reader’s Picks
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Devoxx, aka Javopolis, put on a fine conference.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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19 year old beaten into a miscarriage and 84 year old pepper sprayed at Occupy Seattle.
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The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality.
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10 nasty images of OWS beatings
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The use of thousands of police to repress Occupy protests costs a lot of money. The 1%ers say this is a reason to repress the protests.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Here comes fuel from sawgrass.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered the first strains of Escherichia coli bacteria that can digest switchgrass biomass and synthesize its sugars into [gasoline, diesel and jet fuels]. What’s more, the microbes are able to do this without any help from enzyme additives.
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Gulf Seafood still a mess. FDA’s claims don’t add up
I was distressed to hear FDA’s Robert Dickey’s statements on the show, He claimed (without any substantiating evidence) that “The seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is safe to consume for all consumers including pregnant women and children;” [in quantities hard for anyone to eat in a given time] … The FDA’s comments are simply not consistent with the reality [ordinary quantities can cause harm].
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Multi Biz Holdings builds an asbestos paper mill in Texas.
According to Manta.com, Texas and Florida each have hundreds of paper mills. No one should use asbestos and people who find out their company does should quit to protect their health.
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Finance
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US companies have lots of cash, but use it for stock buybacks, while firing workers.
This shows the falsity of arguments that we should reduce their taxes to crete jobs. We ought to raise their taxes and spend the money to create jobs.
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NYT boosts Gates and Buffet while lampooning tax cheats of a man worth an order of magnitude less.
A handful of billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates have joined Democrats in calling for an elimination of the breaks, saying that the current system adds to the budget deficit, contributes to the widening income gap between the richest and the rest of society, and shifts the tax burden onto small businesses and the middle class.
Mr. Lauder’s tax dodges are outrageous but proportionality less so than those of Gates and Buffet. There are plenty of leads for an honest paper to follow so the NYT should be ashamed of taking Gates’ word.
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Anti-Trust
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A doomed deal? AT&T withdraws T-Mobile bid at the FCC
Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn, who has opposed the merger from the start, said today in a statement that “the chances that AT&T will take over T-Mobile are almost gone…. AT&T’s move will, for the moment, prevent the FCC from making public its many, well-documented findings that the deal is not in the public interest and will prevent the judge overseeing the antitrust lawsuit from seeing the FCC’s conclusions.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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New EU Parliamentary Forum To Push For Even More Draconian Copyright Laws And Enforcement
this is designed as another talking shop to give industry lobbyists an opportunity to bend the ear of European politicians. Conspicuous by their absence, of course, are any representatives of those most affected by legislation — the public. It’s also a chance for copyright maximalists to get together and repeat the same unsubstantiated claims about the “damage” caused by piracy and the need for urgent action, as Gallo’s first conference, “IPR enforcement in the digital era”, makes clear
Sadly, Techdirt uses the same loaded language as the maximalists instead of challenging terms like “piracy.”
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Fake forum comments are ‘eroding’ trust in the web
Some firms have created tens of thousands of fake accounts to flood chat forums and skew debate. … They give the example of a spike in activity on a World of Warcraft chat forum on the Chinese website Baidu. … A PR company later claimed it had employed 800 individuals to run 20,000 separate accounts on the site … The US military is known to use fakes to infiltrate chat forums to gather information about potential terror groups. Similarly many Facebook pages are plagued by bogus friends and “social bots” that are used to stage debates.
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OCCUPIED: Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy, here.
The Supreme Court, in the 5-4 Citizens United decision of January 2010, declared that corporations have free speech rights like human beings and invalidated the ban on corporate election spending that Congress had enacted. Since then, a grassroots movement has emerged to generate popular support for a constitutional amendment to reverse that decision, including months of work by Move to Amend, Free Speech For People, Public Citizen, People For The American Way, Common Cause, and the Center for Media and Democracy. Rep. Deutch’s amendment is a blend of the best ideas.
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Censorship
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US Citizens: Tell your lawmakers to oppose ProtectIP
Be sure to remove language about “IP” and other propaganda terms to concentrate on rights and censorship.
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EFF: Free Speech is Only as Strong as the Weakest Link
Even though the Internet is decentralized and distributed, “weak links” in this chain can operate as choke points to accomplish widespread censorship.
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Before trashing the OWS library, Mayor Bloomberg partied at the New York Public Library’s Library Lions gala.
perhaps he was just enjoying the photo opportunity as he exchanged pleasantries with the authors who he held in high enough esteem as to have their works tossed into garbage trucks.
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EU Court Rules ISPs Can’t Be Forced To Filter Out Illegal Content
EU law says national authorities must not adopt measures which would require an ISP to carry out general monitoring – let alone filtering – of the information that it transmits on its network.
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The government of Thailand has contacted Facebook to request the removal of more than 10,000 of its pages that are deemed in breach of laws preventing the defamation of the country’s royal family.
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An American Taliban Governor issues a fatwa against a teenager who challenged previous fatwas against abortion, contracetpion and sex toys.
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Civil Rights
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How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities
“Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. … The real problem, from the real powers behind the scenes (banksters and the EU), was how to get Greece under control as the austerity-screws tightened. … that meant taking away the universities’ “amnesty” protection, in place for nearly four decades, so that no one, nowhere, would be safe from police truncheons, gas, or bullets.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Traffic jams, ISPs and net neutrality
our analysis shows that if net neutrality were abolished, ISPs actually have less incentive to expand infrastructure. … placing a price on prioritizing content creates an inherent disincentive to expand infrastructure. ISPs would profit from a congested Internet in which some content providers will be more than willing to pay an additional fee for faster delivery to users. Content providers like the New York Times and Google would have little choice but to fork it over to get their information to end users. But end users would be unlikely to see the promised upgrades in speed. Those are some of the results of research we conducted on the Internet market.
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Facebook is trying to scare users away from the internet and makes it difficult for them to go there.
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Facebook’s desire to violate privacy translates into a friend of the court letter in support of banksters defrauding home owners.
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DRM
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Cheap-as-chips kit smashes Intel’s HD video encryption
The fact that we were able to achieve this in the context of a PhD thesis and using materials costing just €200 is not a ringing endorsement of the security of the current HDCP system.
This is good news but we can’t count on such tricks working forever.
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Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library ‘On Hold,’ Apologizes, Shrugs
Digital handcuffs do this to everything eventually.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Corporations Are Patenting Human Genes and Tissues — Here’s Why That’s Terrifying
In a recent phone interview with AlterNet, [Harriet] Washington discussed the dark implications of corporate medical patents, how we find ourselves in this nightmarish scenario and what needs to be done to stop medical research profits from trumping human health.
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EU regulator “concerned” over cellphone patents war
This is the first time that the EU’s antitrust chief has publicly voiced his concerns over patent wars in the mobile telephony sector.
Both the article and the antitrust chief use the confusing term “IP” and both treat Apple and Samsung as equal abusers of patents but it is good to see the issue addressed.
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Copyrights
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Private Copying: French Parliament Downsizes The Public’s Rights
In the name of private copy levy, we are deprived of the right to copy! Such negation of the rights of the public is coherent with Nicolas Sarkozy’s policies aimed at turning copyright into a repressive weapon against cultural practices in the hands of industrial lobbies.
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