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Links - New and Old Censorship, Anti-trust, Privacy Violations and Pollution.

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  • Security



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  • Finance





  • Anti-Trust

    • Pay TV piracy hits News
      The actions are documented in an archive of 14,400 emails held by former Metropolitan Police commander Ray Adams who was European chief for Operational Security between 1996 and 2002. The Financial Review is publishing thousands of the emails on its website at URL afr.com.

      The emails show that Murdoch used "piracy" as a competitive weapon, helping people to break the digital handcuffs of rival's pay TV boxes. The loss of face and revenue helped Murdoch to consolidate his media empire.



    • Microsoft all but buys Netscape with AOL patent acqusition

      This Microsoft friendly news source uses gloats over this superposed "end of the browser wars" and uses the term "intellectual property" while glorifying and validating software patents.



  • Censorship

    • The reason I'm helping Chris Hedges' lawsuit against the NDAA
      the Homeland Battlefield Bill has already a chilling effect upon my ability to investigate and document matters of national controversy that would ordinarily be subject to my professional inquiry. It has therefore prevented my readers from receiving the full spectrum of truthful reporting which, in a functioning democracy, they have a right to expect.


    • Iraq’s internet on the brink
      A year since the Arab Spring, the internet in the region is facing significant threats from governments trying to gain more control over it.


    • Media companies & ISPs outline plan to stop piracy

      Not so voluntary censorship is set to roll out on people in the US. Appealing accusations of sharing will cost people $35.



    • World Without Web
      ... we underestimate the alarming degree of contingency lurking behind ‘inevitable’ developments. ... The divergence point for this history is in 1983-1984, when the leadership of DARPA lied through its teeth to Congress about who was being allowed access to the Internet. ... what if DARPA had been caught in that lie, funding for its network research scaled back, and a serious effort made to kick randoms off the early net?


    • CISPA – The Sneaky Son Of SOPA

      A good collection of links about a nasty law against sharing.





  • Civil Rights



  • Privacy



  • Education Watch



  • DRM

    • How Adobe DRM Requires People to Pirate Library Books
      Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. ... It turns out that a majority of the 6,495 titles available at my local library were accessible only through a locked .acsm file format. ...you can think of a .acsm file as being very much like a .torrent file. If you use Windows or Mac, you can (theoretically) download and install Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). This software reads the .acsm file and then it will download the actual .epub book, complete with DRM. ... there is no legal way to access the content without breaking the law if you are using free (libre) software.

      Tell your local librarian to never use a system like this!





  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Another Patent Attack on Google with More Wild $$ Predictions ~pj
      Nokia and Microsoft. Partners at law, so to speak. Is this another Microsoft/Nokia outsourced production? Remember when Barnes & Noble told us that it views Microsoft and Nokia's patent campaign as an antitrust violation, a deliberate campaign to destroy Android and maintain Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and extend it to smartphones, with Nokia piggybacking with its patents for weapons and MOSAID being brought in to do some of the dirty work? So when you read the scare headlines, remember this: Google is awesome at patent litigation. It tends to prevail. I told you that when Oracle first sued Google


    • Oracle’s Position is Worse Than I Thought


    • USPTO Issues Interim Mayo Guidance ~pj
      "...the claimed product or process amounts to significantly more than a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea with conventional steps specified at a high level of generality appended thereto." Why *wouldn't* that apply to software?


    • Mayo Decision Impacts Myriad Genetics - Judgment Vacated, Remanded ~pj
      Things are looking up in PatentLand


    • Prometheus bound: An important precedent for the next software patent case
      Plainly, this was not a dispute about software patents, but the Court’s unanimous opinion will guide it and lower courts as they analyze future software patent cases.


    • Copyrights

      • Judge rules file sharing is not a "conspiracy"
        The litigators are trying to get around the fact that judges aren't happy with allowing mass lawsuits, so what they are doing is taking one internet user to court but using that lawsuit as a pretext to subpoena other defendants who had participated in the same BitTorrent swarm. ... James Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois raised his eyebrow in disgust at this trick, saying that it was trying to get around the "stiffening judicial headwind."


      • 5000+ Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion
        “We’re one of the worlds top 60 sites in the Internet. This brings us a responsibility to use the site to do something good. When I think about it, it’s insane that all the other top 100 sites only blast ads and self-centered stuff on their front pages. We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we’re everything the major labels are not.”


      • 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up

        See also this excllent summary

        To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.


      • DRM is crushing indie booksellers online


      • MPAA Lines Up With Porn Studio in Steamy Copyright Dispute

        A video site that published movies as urls is surprised that people would download those movies. They also found a judge that agrees enough to shut down a website where users share the urls, sometimes as embedded movies.







  • Recent Techrights' Posts

    Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
    After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
    The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
    So it is probably quite potent
    The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
    Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
    Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
    If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
    Now Confirmed in Western Media: Microsoft Azure Layoffs This Month
    Affirmed by more sources moments ago
    10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
    a 55-second clip of his talk
    Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
    Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
     
    The Demise of Shopping in Person
    In a world like this, how valued is the customer?
    We Are Safe in a Modern "Tech" Society, Right?
    People are safer if they control their own computing
    This Past Friday, "Nearly 700 People Came to Listen to RMS!" (Richard Stallman)
    "Nearly 700 people came to listen to RMS!"
    Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT Churning Out Plagiarism and the Slopfarm LinuxSecurity Turns to Pseudonyms
    Our hunch is, UbuntuPIT will sooner or later realise that this toxic approach is just harming UbuntuPIT and tainting the reputation of past articles
    Gemini Links 11/10/2025: Nyctography, Gerrymandering, and Lurking
    Links for the day
    Links 11/10/2025: World Mental Health Day 2025, Another European Legal Defeat for Microsoft 360
    Links for the day
    MIT Technology Review is Part-Time SPAMfarm of Billionaires and Mega-Corporations
    Does MIT operate its own "b2b" SPAMfarm?
    Open Source Initiative Executive Director Leaves, Replacement Sought by Monopolists, Not the Community or OSI Members
    Serves to show who runs this show...
    Links 11/10/2025: China-US Tensions Grow Again, "Hey Hi" More Widely Recognised as Bubble Made of Capital That Doesn't Exist
    Links for the day
    Peter O'Callaghan QC represented grandparents, Westernport Hotel, at Liquor Royal Commission
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Either The Register MS Divests From FOSS Coverage or Liam Proven is on Long Holiday
    Publishers perish when their audience loses trust in them
    Microsoft Cancelling Another Datacentre is a Sign of Financial Trouble and Lack of Growth
    The debt continues to grow
    Gemini Links 11/10/2025: An Evening at the Fair and Fast Fourier Friday
    Links for the day
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 10, 2025
    IRC logs for Friday, October 10, 2025
    Geminispace is Very Large
    The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
    Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
    This time it's China again
    Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
    Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
    "Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
    ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
    Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
    Links for the day
    Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
    A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
    Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
    Links for the day
    Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
    Google itself is a slop pusher these days
    Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
    A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
    XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
    "everyone is ditching the xbox."
    Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
    Links for the day
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
    IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
    Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
    Links for the day
    Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
    There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
    New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
    It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
    The Slop Song
    The train wreck marches on
    LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
    Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
    Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
    Links for the day
    "Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
    Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
    IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
    Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
    Links for the day