04.10.12

Hardware

• The smartphone Wars: Finally, Android breaks 50%

Health/Nutrition

• Exercise makes you think.

• FDA to Consumers: We’re still thinking about it. Sorry you’re still eating it

  FDA is kicking the BPA-lined can further down the road in an announcement today that the Agency plans to keep studying this issue while consumers continue to be exposed. Specifically, the Agency’s response to NRDC’s petition is: “FDA has determined, as a matter of science and regulatory policy, that the best course of action at this time is to continue our review and study of emerging data on BPA.”

• The 9 nastiest things in your supermarket

Security

• FBI: Smart Meter Hacks Likely to Spread

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Student’s Science Project Shuts Down Dallas Airport

  An amateur video posted on YouTube shows several people being led away from the scene in handcuffs

• The spread of “Suspicious Activity Reporting”

  “They’ve created this expensive, and resource-intensive system that has a huge impact on innocent people’s privacy,” said German. “And yet there is no science showing that this is an effective way of going about law enforcement or intelligence gathering.”

  LAPD’s infamous Special Order 1 and “iWatch” are war on the different

• PREAL: The “Torture Textbook” That Took CIA Interrogators to the Dark Side

  The CIA substituted their own controls; learned helplessness had become the goal.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Gulf’s dolphins pay heavy price for Deepwater oil spil

  New studies show impact of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster on dolphins and other marine wildlife may be far worse than feared

• Mississippi residents find death along oily Gulf shores

  Storms continue to stir up oil which kills sea life and poisons people.

• Deadly Bacteria Found In Gulf Coast Tar Balls

• The Fracking Frenzy’s Impact on Women

  Radium, toluene, benzine and other nasties lead to abortions, birth defects and breast cancer around fracking rigs. Abusive oil company culture also promotes crime.

• Japan reopens parts of Fukushima evacuation zone

  Parts of each town will remain off-limits because of higher exposure levels. Eight other towns in the same low-contamination category have not yet decided which areas should be reopened.

• 2C of warming is a pipe dream

• Evaluating a 1981 temperature projectionEvaluating a 1981 temperature projection

  Obviously climate science was a mature field even then: the concepts and conclusions have not changed all that much. Hansen et al clearly indicate what was well known (all of which still stands today) and what was uncertain. … It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test.

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

• Chris Hedges on the NDAA: Totalitarian Systems Always Begin by Rewriting the Law

• Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Wisconsin Equal Pay Law

Privacy

• Apple holds the master decryption key when it comes to iCloud security, privacy

• Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip-Searches for Any Arrest

  The procedures endorsed by the majority are forbidden by statute in at least 10 states and are at odds with the policies of federal authorities. According to a supporting brief filed by the American Bar Association, international human rights treaties also ban the procedures.

  Humilliation is not just for the airport.

• Facebook to Help Third Parties Use Location-related Data

  In the concert venue example, a ticket seller could inform someone if any of their Facebook friends were going to a given concert, Williams said. That could give them the chance to meet up or let the vendor persuade the consumer to buy a ticket, he said. … [PJ: This is creepy. Does you pretty teenage daughter actually know all her so-called "friends" on Facebook? ...]

• How The Bing Toolbar May Accidentally Submit Private Pages & Ads

  The way they spied on what users typed into the Google Toolbar was no accident and I doubt this is either. Non free software always demands the ability to spy.

Education Watch

• Eye Opener: Turkish Charter Schools Sweep Across America Funded By Walmart Family

  the United States is the only country where Gülen has been able to fully fund schools with taxpayer money. In all other nations, Gülen schools are what one would expect they would be: private religious schools.

• ‘A Test You Need to Fail’: A Teacher’s Open Letter to Her 8th Grade Students

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.