12.24.11
Links – Pollution, Censorship, Education and Civil Rights Watch
Reader’s Picks
-
Cory Doctorow: My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
-
Building your own supercomputer using Ubuntu and Kerrighed:
The following page describes how to build your very own supercomputer using household-type easily available parts and tying them all together using Kerrighed, a Single System Image operating system for clusters.
-
Science
-
Microsoft Kicke off CES Keynote Stage
I’m surprised they were ivited back after last year’s embarrassment.
-
-
Hardware
-
The Future of Academic Research
When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research. [not] bookstores, telecommunications, matchmaking services, newspapers, pornography, stock trading, music distribution, or a great many other industries… And yet it has not.
-
-
Security
-
Pogson: M$ Attacks Slated
Slated.org has a post about finding a cross-site scripting attack from M$’s network. I checked my log, too.
-
The Sovereign Keys Project
Sovereign Keys will protect HTTPS and other uses of TLS/SSL against a wide variety of attacks, including attacks involving Certificate Authorities and domain validation, and attacks that involve downgrading or blocking encrypted connections. It operates by providing an optional and very secure way of associating domain names with public keys …
-
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists
-
The US said it will attack Iran if it tries to build a nuclear weapon.
-
The CIA drone attacks in Pakistan have killed 60 people since September. The Obama regime has covered up the identities of 59 of them, as well as all other relevant information.
-
-
Cablegate
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Breakthrough could double solar energy output
much of the energy delivered by sunlight comes in the form of “hot” electrons, which are too high-energy to be converted to electricity in silicon and are instead lost as heat. For that reason, the max insolation-to-electricity efficiency of a silicon solar cell used today is considered to be about 31%. … Zhu’s process involves absorbing the photon of sunlight in a plastic – in his experiments, pentacene – to produce a dark quantum “shadow state” from which two electrons can be retrieved, instead of just one. … Right now, his experiments use ordinary sunlight, and not focused sunlight, and he’s getting 44% efficiency.
-
What the Frack? Hydraulic Fracturing Companies Exempt from Public Health Laws
the “Halliburton Loophole” and exempts hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) practices from regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act. This circumventing of integral public health legislation gets its name from the man who inserted the exemption into the bill—then-Vice President Dick Cheney
-
The FDA abandoned a plan to block the practice of giving farm animals small amounts of antibiotics.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died in recent decades from the infections that cannot be treated because of the resistance stimulated by that practice. Clearly this is the work of agribusiness and pharmaceutical companies, and shows how many Americans they are prepared to kill to avoid a decrease in income. But the real scandal is that our governmental system allows them to do this.
-
Clinton is threatening economic warfare to stop an EU plan to make airlines pay for their carbon emissions.
-
Japanese mothers rise up against nuclear power
Experts view the ongoing protests as a landmark in Japan’s fledgling social movements long consigned to the sidelines of a prosperous and hardworking society that puts a premium on achievement and success. “The ongoing demonstrations symbolise the determination of ordinary people who do not want nuclear power because it is dangerous. There is also the bigger message that we do not trust the government any more,” said Takanobu Kobayashi, who manages the Matsudo network of citizens’ movements.
-
2011 broke records for many kinds of weather disasters.
-
US citizens: thank Obama for the new EPA regulations on toxic mercury emissions.
-
Selling toxic sewage sludge under the name of “biosolids”.
The Water Environment Federation (WEF), the sewage sludge industry trade group that invented the Orwellian PR euphemism “biosolids” for toxic sludge in 1991, is now “rebranding” sewage treatment plants as “water resource recovery facilities.” … A 2008 study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that the toxins in sludge end up in food from livestock grazing on sludge-contaminated land.
-
-
Finance
-
A Christmas Message From America’s Rich
You have to have skin in the game … If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up.
-
Occupy Wall Street comes home to roost with Congo’s ‘debt vultures’
A “vulture” is a financial speculator who, as we recently reported, gets his hands on debts owed by desperately poor nations. The Brooklyn “vulture” targeted by OWS and Friends of the Congo is Peter Grossman. Two weeks ago, the Guardian exposed him as a financier who is demanding the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world’s poorest nation, pay $100m to the hedge fund he manages, FG Hemisphere. … The 1% must be dismayed to learn that eviction does not end conviction.
This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Peter Grossman.
-
UK Uncut will sue the government for its sweetheart tax deal with Goldman Sachs. -
Corruption in Birmingham, Alabama, has driven up water and sewer rates to the point where many poor people are being cut off.
-
-
Anti-Trust
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Why are Britain’s great art houses in bed with Big Oil?
Were the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor to curate a History of the World in 100 Lost Objects, object No 1 might be all the taxes from Big Oil we never received, along with the hole in the national finances created by all the corporate welfare they have claimed. If we had those taxes then we would not need to have grandiose PR philanthropy to pay for our art galleries and museums. That said, if BP is garnering all this publicity for giving the Tate half a million quid a year, then that is a small fraction of the – what is it? – 60 million quid the Tate gets from us. So to talk about the collapse of the arts without the sugar daddy is disingenuous. … Big business sponsorship narrows the spectrum of human imagination in many subtle ways.
-
-
Censorship
-
The List Of Internet Censoring Countries The MPAA Thinks Provide A Good Example For The US
Yes, it’s a sort of a who’s who of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
-
Lawsuit challenges animal enterprise terror law as unconstitutional
Like many “terrorism” laws, this one was vague enough to turn free speech into terrorism. The purpose was to silence and jail corporate critics.
-
Censorship and turmoil in Egypt
Eleven people were killed by brutal policemen in Egypt. A lesser tragedy is the loss of 200,000 books in a library built by Napoleon to hold the country’s finest. It is doubtful that the works had been scanned and shared, so many one of a kind works are surely lost.
-
Twitter suspiciously suspends a journalist account.
Looks like my Twitter account wasn’t the only one suspended without warning for covering #NDAA and #OWS.
-
Facebook censors a critic.
No surprise there.
-
Veoh Still Perfectly Legal… But Also Still Dead Due To Bogus Copyright Lawsuit
this should be a huge warning sign for why SOPA/PIPA would be a disaster. Just look at the status of Veoh today. It’s out of business due to a totally bogus DMCA claim that forced it into court. At least under the DMCA, it was able to keep its site up. SOPA/PIPA set up a system whereby sites don’t just have to defend themselves in court after they’ve already been shut down, but they can’t even keep their business going at all while the process is ongoing. Given situations like Veoh and the Dajaz1 takedown, it should be quite obvious that copyright holders have a long history of killing off perfectly legal services by abusing copyright law.
-
Gibson Guitar & Others On SOPA Supporters List Say They Never Supported The Bill
A funny thing, no one wants to be responsible for the bill they spent so much money purchasing.
-
“Go Daddy” Publicly Reverses on SOPA: But They’re Still Slime
-
Turkey has arrested over 25 journalists for their writing.
-
Censorship
Imprisoning people for what they say is tyranny, but freedom of speech is threatened around the world in supposedly “free” countries. In the US, investigating and criticizing agribusiness is called “terrorism” and punished by imprisonment. In the UK, speaking “racist insults” is punished by imprisonment. In France, some opinions about 20th century history will be punished by imprisonment. In India, books are banned; Taslima Nasrin’s book “Shame”, about oppression of Hindus in Bangladesh, was banned in West Bengal — and now ideas distasteful to any major religion are likely to be banned too.
-
-
Privacy
-
Cybersecurity bill promotes exchange of data; critics say measure could harm privacy rights
“They’re just going to blow a hole through all the privacy laws on the books for cybersecurity purposes,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The concern is that the government will be able to create records of people’s Internet use in the name of cybersecurity.”
-
EFF: Analyzing Carrier IQ Profiles
The EFF wants to learn what the carriers meant to collect and will present the result to regulators. If you have a rooted/jailbroken phone, and can find a Profile on it, please send 1) a copy of the Profile, 2) which phone and network it was from, and 3) where on the phone’s file system you found it. You can email iqiq@eff.org or put it in a git remote they can pull from.
-
-
Education Watch
-
Madness: Even School Children Are Being Pepper-Sprayed and Shocked with Tasers
An alarming series of incidents offers some insight into how casual police have become about deploying “less lethal” weapons.
-
Seattle Education blog turns attention to Charter School push
Beginning on Monday, December 26th, the focus of this blog will be on charter schools. Why charter schools? Because Stand for Children, the League of Education Voters, the Washington State PTA along with DFER will be descending upon our representatives in Olympia trying to convince them that the privatization of our public schools is what our state and children need.
-
-
Civil Rights
-
Some Occupy L.A. protesters may get a lesson in free speech
LA courts disgrace themselves by arresting peaceful protesters and then extorting money from them on behalf of a private company.
-
Santa’s Elves are Slaves in China
-
Argentina has foisted a ban on Falklands islands ships onto other countries in South America.
-
-
Copyrights
Content is available under CC-BY-SA