04.19.12

Links – CISPA threatens US Citizens. Death to Word

Posted in Site News at 1:58 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• How LibreOffice Writer Tops MS Word: 12 Features

  It amazes me that anyone would consider using Word or Windows but here are some technical reasons not to.

• Death to Word. It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor

• Google Chrome OS Review: Heading Towards Microsoft Market?

• Behind the Scenes at Instagram: Tools for Building Reliable Web Services

  how do you build a service and scale it to the size and success of Instagram? At least part of the answer lies in choosing your tools wisely.

  Hint: they don’t use IIS.

• An effort to upgrade SSH, from MIT

  This paper describes Mosh, a mobile shell application that supports intermittent connectivity, allows roaming, and provides speculative local echo of user keystrokes. Mosh is built on the State Synchronization Protocol, a new UDP-based protocol that securely synchronizes client and server state, even across client IP address changes.

• Play the eyballing game

• Hardware

  • ESR: Making simple connections

    It was an open invitation to help develop a cheap millisecond-precision time source for instrumented routers, so we can do delay tomography on the Internet and measure the bufferbloat problem. … In effect, I became the lead designer on a new electronics product by email. Just me. No corporate-backing, no million-dollar development budget, one guy saying “Hey, if you connect this to that, cool things will happen!” – negotiating directly with people on the other side of the planet who’ll never meet me face to face. … Wow…it really is the 21st century! …

• Health/Nutrition

  • The Worst Farm Bill Ever?.

  • US Hospitals scramble on the front lines of drug shortages

  • Peru Passes Monumental Ten Year Ban on Genetically Engineered Foods

    Research by ASPEC confirms something that Peruvians knew all along: GM foods are on the shelves of our markets and wineries, and consumers buy them and take them into their homes to eat without knowing it. Nobody tells us, no one says anything, which involves a clear violation of our right to information

• Security

  • HP Ships Virus-Infected Flash Card With ProCurve Switch

    Anything a Microsoft OS touches can have this problem.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Sometimes, When “All the Facts are In,” It’s Worse: The UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Report

  • Cop Watcher Jailed Twice

    Cop watching — the act of turning a camera on police — is not illegal. But in areas policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it can still land you in jail. … She spent a hellish night in a cell with no bed, forced to sleep on a cold floor. “They kept the air-conditioning running full blast like they wanted to punish me,” she says … when the jailers returned her belongings, her camcorder footage had been erased — an act that First Amendment attorneys say is illegal. It also violates department policy. She was told the obstruction charge had been dropped and was handed a written citation for being “under the influence of a controlled substance.”

  • What local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records

    The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?

    Drug use seems to be a catch all accusation thrown against people the police don’t like.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

    Ongoing.

• Finance

  • Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule

    You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening.

  • Excerpt: At Goldman Sachs Servicer, ‘Total Disaster’

    “Had companies changed their philosophy and said, ‘You know what? We’re not going to beef up our collections staff; we’re going to beef up our loss mitigation staff.’ Had they done that and come up with loan modification scenarios that were reasonable and put people into more affordable payments early on, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

  • Five Reasons Why The Very Rich Have NOT Earned Their Money

    Ongoing anti-competitive business and government granted monopolies are not even mentioned.

• Anti-Trust

  • Nokia makes Lumia 900 free to all AT&T customers, now through April 21st

    This is called dumping. People who fall for it will also end up with ATT/Microsoft, how miserable.

  • Proposal: Open Source Life, Not Death Sentence, for Windows XP

    Microsoft is not a free software company because they don’t think they can screw users enough that way and would rather go bankrupt.

  • Why Microsoft’s New Open Source Company?

    Both points 3 and 4 [Firewall open source licensing and patent liability so that they can give as little and threaten as much as possible] are widely understood to be part of the reason Microsoft started the Outercurve Foundation, as a destination to outsource open source projects it wanted to start while isolating itself from any perceived risks its imaginative legal time might envisage.

• Censorship

  • With Friends Like M$, Who Needs Enemies?

    M$ recently boasted how it was making the Internet safe by grabbing servers and domains connected to botnets. It turns out they were a bull in a china shop breaking all kinds of legitimate sites and blocking the work of real security businesses.

  • Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google’s Sergey Brin

    He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.

  • Inside Washington’s high risk mission to beat web censors

    Free speech is for people who say good things about the US.

• Privacy

  • This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.

    Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act’s expanded police powers — and win. … His recipe for Calyx was inspired by those six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that’s stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can’t read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year.

  • ACLU: Kicking off “Stop Cyber Spying Week”

    The bill would create a loophole in all existing privacy laws, allowing companies to share Internet users’ data with the National Security Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and the biggest spy agency in the world — without any legal oversight. If CISPA passes, companies like Google and Facebook could pass your online communications to the military, just by claiming they were motivated by “cybersecurity purposes.” CISPA would give the companies immunity from lawsuits if you want to challenge what they are doing. Once the government has the information, the bill allows them to use it for any legal purpose other than regulation, not just for stopping cybersecurity threats.

    This bill would complete the public/private cooperation started by the U SAP AT RIOT ACT and legalize the worst abuses.

  • Revealed: CISPA — Internet Spying Law — Pushed by For-Profit Spy Lobby

    defense contractors, many already working with the National Security Agency on related data-mining projects, are lobbying to press forward. Like many bad policy ideas, entrenched government contractors seem to be using taxpayer money to lobby for even more power and profit.

    Microsoft, of course, is on the list but so are other big hitters like Lockheed Martin. Richard Stallman, in his political notes, says, “The Internet defeated SOPA with the help of many of the same businesses that are ready to acquiesce to CISPA. CISPA is the test for whether the users of the Internet can block an oppressive law.”

• Civil Rights

  • An economic recovery that leaves workers further behind

    American workers have lost all their bargaining power. … First, American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. Second, with the rate of private-sector unionization down to a microscopic 6.9 percent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay. Employers can serenely blow them off — and judging by the data, that’s exactly what employers are doing.

• Education Watch

  • The American Middle Class Was the Strongest in the World When It Was the Best Educated in the World

    postwar American factory workers weren’t modestly educated people by the standard of their time, they were the best-educated factory workers on the planet. And it’s not just true for the postwar decades. A still-underappreciated fact about the United States is that for the bulk of our history we were the best-educated country on earth. … Today, it’s merely middling.

  • Teacher Fired For Organizing A Fundraiser For Trayvon Martin

    This is what happens without teacher’s unions

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Why one in five U.S. adults don’t use the Internet

    Expensive and ratty networks keep US citizens off the internet. Big publishers try to convince us all those without don’t want it by quoting people who don’t know any better and can’t tell us if they have been misrepresented.

• DRM

  • International Day Against DRM — May 4, 2012

    Join the party if you can.

• Copyrights

  • Yes, Copyright’s Sole Purpose Is To Benefit The Public

    to claim that the protections of the author are greater than or even equal to the benefits to the nation, is a clear flip-flopping of the method with the purpose. Of course, in doing so, it not only flip flops the method and the purpose, but it completely distorts the nature of copyright law, and leads to maximalist-style positions, where absolutely no consideration is given to how the public benefits (or, more importantly, is hurt) from specific changes to copyright law.

  • The case was thrown out but Goldman Sach’s programmer spent a year in jail and the judges recommended changes to law that would criminalize what he did.

  • Paramount Thinks That Louis CK Making $1 Million In 12 Days Means He’s Not Monetizing

    The propaganda machine is failing as artists succeed.

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