12.28.11

Links – Microsoft, Big Publishers in decline, and Fools keep pushing for SOPA.

Posted in Site News at 3:10 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

Android Approved By Pentagon For DoD Usage, Major Setback For iPhone

This article makes some great points but only software freedom will guard the user against Malware and there might not be any US cell phones that are free. It goes without saying that Blackberry should not be used either.
American corporate software can no longer be trusted for anything

The discussions around SOPA have shown a very unfortunate side of United States policymaking — that its policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy. … Free software is not a matter of money anymore, if it ever was. It’s a matter of freedom and sovereignty.

No one should trust non free software but idiotic US laws can ruin intentional trust in US made free software as well. Free software has always been about sovereignty but the non free software companies have been more abusive and obvious lately and people are noticing. The USA Patriot act is a similar liability for US service providers. The author even doubts Android.

Techrights covered US government abuse of trade policy for Microsoft’s benefit in leaked diplomatic cables. This should outrage other US software companies such as Red Hat, IBM and Google.
Debian GNU/Linux Testing

The next release of Debian GNU/Linux is shaping up beautifully. … At the rate they are going, Wheezy could be released before “8″.
Google market cap is set to pass Microsoft’s soon.
Hardware
- Android drivers to be sucked back into Linux kernel.
  
  Greg Kroah-Hartman himself will include the Android drivers into his development branch for the upcoming Linux kernel 3.3, making it boot on Android devices without being patched.
Anti-Trust
- Microsoft monopoly in retreat everywhere:
  
  Walmart Sells Linux Online
  
  This marks the return of desktop gnu/linux to Walmart. Microsoft had bullied every piece of the supply chain back in 2006 to remove this competition and pulled similar tricks against netbooks everywhere. Back in April, GNU/Linux came back to Walmart as a tablet in April. Other stores, like Best Buy, are trying to sell $1,000 Windows laptops as if it were 1995 again.
- Amazon messes with Android
  
  Just days ago we reported and confirmed that Amazon’s Kindle Fire prevented owners from visiting the Android Market in the Silk browser. The 7-inch tablet reportedly contains a hidden utility app called “MarketIntentProxy.apk” which can detect when the end-user is hunting for an app, and will force a re-direct to the Amazon Appstore installed on the device — literally hijacking the browser. Now days later, Kindle Fire customers are reporting that they suddenly have access to the Android Market via the Silk browser.
  
  No matter how good software is, the owners have unjust power over you if you are not using free software. When you do have software freedom, you need to be careful to use a good, community curated distribution. Companies with ties to big publishers will sell you out.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
- People in Glasshouses (With Windows) Shouldn’t Throw Stones
  
  Microsoft’s call for “droidrage” stories on Android comes across not just as a rather feeble attempt to divert people’s attention from Windows Phone’s abysmal showing in the smartphone market, but also as deeply hypocritical: if there is any platform that deserves a “rage” tag, it’s Windows, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars of harm it has inflicted on its users
  
  Most people love their Android phones and tablets, so Microsoft will have to write the rage stories themselves.
Censorship
- Microsoft’s shameful, continued support of SOPA
- Harvard Researchers Explain That SOPA Supporters Are Misusing Their Research To Support SOPA
  
  Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specific pieces of political content. … in addition to mandating DNS filtering, SOPA would make many circumvention tools illegal. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism.
- An interesting video on how big publishers used P2P services to push their “lame” TV shows and music and then used the sharing for propaganda purposes to gain more power over internet based competition.
  
  Forbes dismisses the thesis by intentionally misunderstanding it. The “internet radio” story and the shutdown of competitors like mp3.com show that goal of the war against sharing has always been control of competition. Anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and Tivized hardware show that big publishers demand complete control of all computers as well as the internet. It is hard for me to imagine the Forbes author being unaware of these efforts.
Why “Safe Harbor” Laws Are Disastrous For Free Speech

the “safe harbor” provisions have gradually shifted the environment to suppress free speech and expression in favor of the suppressing industries: the copyright industries. … The DMCA was, and is, an abomination. So is the habit of letting corporations guard our right to free speech. It must be unconditional, and it isn’t when there is any kind of intermediary liability. … corporations would rather err on the side of caution, preferring to throw a thousand users to the wolves in error than becoming liable for one shielded in error.
The lawmakers who brought you SOPA and other censorship bills

anyone running against these folks would be missing out on a huge opportunity not to make the incumbent’s support of censoring the internet into a campaign issue.

Many of the names are familiar from other legislative disasters.
The GoDaddy boycott was effective, so people should boycott other companies too.

GoDaddy capitulating is a huge win, because it’s the first stone to come out of the wall. Now that GoDaddy has demonstrated that they were taking too much damage to continue with their support of SOPA, it empowers people to exert similar pressure on other companies, and it demonstrates to those companies that there are enough angry people out there that you need to listen up and pay attention.

Keep migrating your domains and avoid things from the other bullies who would waste your money ruining the internet to preserve their position in the world.
Civil Rights
- OWS Fights Back Against Police Surveillance by Launching “Occucopter” Citizen Drone
  
  police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and “frozen zones”. This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering. Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.
Internet/Net Neutrality
- People say a lot of ill-informed things about Chrome, and mostly they don’t deserve a response, but …
  
  It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. … Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. … the whole “You’re funding a competitor!!!” angle is misguided. Google is funding a partner.