04.26.12

Links – ACTA/CISPA Update, Other Crimes, Corruption and Failure.

Posted in Site News at 7:20 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Seattle Rex vs. Apple: The Verdict Is In

  A few years ago, Apple sold me a $4,000 computer with a defective graphics chip/logic board. The defective part was the Nvidia 8600M GT GPU, and when it was discovered that the machine was defective, Apple refused to take it back and issue me a refund.

• Seems German parliament (Bundestag) has an email blackout. IIRC they switched from Linux to MSFT Exchange. How ironic.

  That’s not ironic, it’s night follows day predictable.

• Science

  • The Origin of Photosynthesis Revealed

• Health/Nutrition

  • The six qualities that transform bread from junk food to superfood.

• Security

  • Equipment Maker Caught Installing Backdoor Account in Control System Code

    The backdoor, which cannot be disabled, is found in all versions of the Rgged Operating System made by RuggedCom … a static username, “factory,” that was assigned by the vendor and can’t be changed by customers, and a dynamically gnerated password that is based on the individual MAC …

  • Moving from Gmail to Hotmail: the disastrous conclusion

    [why?] … to examine Microsoft’s claims that its webmail system has improved. … I’d also set up Hotmail to import all my Gmail and its associated contacts. Not to mention the Facebook and LinkedIn contacts that Hotmail merges into your online address book. It soon became painfully clear that pretty much anyone I’d had personal or professional contact with over the past decade had been sent an email containing a link to a malicious site. From my account. Me – the editor of a PC magazine. … what’s even more worrying is that it’s not only my webmail that’s been compromised, but my Xbox login (which holds my credit card details) and now my PC login too. Because Windows 8 practically forces you to login with your Windows Live/Hotmail details

    He tries to change his passwords but probably did so with another Windows computer.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Misinformation campaign targets USA TODAY reporter, editor

    A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites. Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.

  • 61-Year Old Woman Violently Arrested after Peacefully Protesting at Koch Brothers Meeting

    This kind of unprofessional behavior by police is too common.

  • Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD

    Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder! … 44 colleges and universities, 15 research foundations and pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals and clinics, and three penal institutions across the country were used for MK-ULTRA research

  • EXCLUSIVE: DOES THIS GIRL LOOK LIKE A TERRORIST?

    Family misses flight after TSA screeners target disabled 7-year-old

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • A Remarkable Week for Corporate Crime

    First Criminal Prosecution in BP Case is an Individual, not a Corporation. Kurt Mix, a former engineer for BP plc, was arrested on charges of intentionally destroying evidence requested by federal criminal authorities investigating the April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon disaster. David Uhlmann, the former head of the Environmental Crimes Section at he Justice Department is puzzled why the government has yet to bring criminal charges against BP and the other companies involved. “The government has a slam dunk criminal case against BP, TransOcean and Halliburton for the negligence that caused the Gulf oil spill,” Uhlmann told Marketplace Radio yesterday “They should bring those criminal charges.”

    Article has 9 other cases of corporate crime that includes bribery, padded billing and poorly labled medicine.

• Finance

  • Former Citigroup Chairman Blames Deregulation For The Financial Crisis

• Anti-Trust

  • How Verizon might kill any hope for LTE interoperability

    The US spectrum is a hopeless mess of uncooperative monopolists that should be replaced with open spectrum because the spectrum belongs to the public and there’s no good technical reason to assign it to anyone.

  • Blamed for Bee Collapse, Monsanto Buys Leading Bee Research Firm

  • SolarWorld president pushes ‘Halftime in America’ review of tactics to offset trade predation on U.S. manufacturing

    Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld Industries America Inc., recommended revisions in the U.S. government response to incursions of predatory trade aggression from non-market economies such as China, as a move toward rekindling U.S. manufacturing and jobs. The need for policy updates, Brinser said, comes as China amasses a new magnitude of economic might and its central planners increasingly target pivotal U.S. industries.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • PR agency is hiring students for a Pro-ACTA demonstration. 100 € for 2 hours. Disgusting, much?

  • Serf and Turf: Crowdturfing for Fun and Profit

    “Crowdturfing” is a term that combines crowdsourcing and astroturfing to describe the use of crowdsurfing sites to create artificial campaigns on microblog sites, forums, instant message groups and blogs. … ing systems. More specifically, we define crowdturfing systems as systems where customers initiate “campaigns,” and a significant number of users obtain financial compensation in exchange for per-forming simple “tasks” that go against accepted user policies.

  • UK: Open Standards consultation – important update

    One of our first discussion roundtables held on the 4th of April (Competition and European Interaction) was facilitated by Dr Andrew Hopkirk who blogged about the event for Computer Weekly and who was engaged by Cabinet Office as an independent facilitator on a pro-bono basis. … he did not declare the fact that he was advising Microsoft directly on the Open Standards consultation. … For this reason any outcomes from the original roundtable discussion will be discounted in the consultation responses and we will rerun that session and give time for people to prepare for it.

    Seel also this CW article setting the stage. The most important thing to remember about the Microsoft game is that they are trying to corrupt your channels of communication too.

  • Lost in translation: Anti-TPP campaign befuddles Washington

    Japan’s agricultural lobby has taken its campaign against a global free trade agreement to the U.S., buying a full-page advertisement in Tuesday’s Washington Post opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

    TPP is a terrible, anti-democratic treaty.

• Censorship

  • Demand Progress petition: Obama Threatens To Veto CISPA: Encourage Him To Stand Strong

  • Insanity: CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed On Rushed Vote

    This is no SOPA, the jerks are moving fast.

  • Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

    Judge O’Grady informed the FBI that Megaupload was never served with criminal charges, which is a requirement to start the trial. The origin of this problem is not merely a matter of oversight. Megaupload’s lawyer Ira Rothken says that unlike people, companies can’t be served outside US jurisdiction. … it is not the first “procedural” mistake either. Last month the New Zealand High Court declared the order used to seize Dotcom’s property “null and void” after it was discovered that the police had acted under a court order that should have never been granted.

  • Server Seizure, April 2012

    “The FBI is using a sledgehammer approach, shutting down service to hundreds of users due to the actions of one anonymous person,” said Devin Theriot-Orr, a spokesperson for Riseup. “This is particularly misguided because there is unlikely to be any information on the server regarding the source of the threatening emails.”

  • Facebook Blocking Stories About Richard O’Dwyer’s Fight Against Extradition To The US

    Facebook is shown to block mention of issues or sites that big publishers. When caught in censorship, Facebook claims to relent because it was a mistake but we should not trust them or the evidence of a few successes.

  • Spreading CISPA Awareness (Similar to SOPA, But Worse), Anonymous Initiates Tweet Bomb

    As indicated, CISPA is expected to be voted on next week … That also means you only have one more weekend to inform yourself and figure out your position on this potentially privacy-threatening piece of Internet legislation.

    The threat is not potential, it is actual.

  • Cispa cybersecurity bill opposed by Obama administration

• Privacy

  • Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails

  • Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance

    At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of—plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms.

    Love the $4 billion dollar boon doggle by big Microsoft partner SAIC. ATT also earns special shame and should be boycotted.

  • If You Have a Smart Phone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move

    The rollout of this technology means there are now at least three ways that users can track their locations indoors, where GPS is generally useless — bluetooth beacon, Spotrank (and proprietary vendor) databases of Wi-Fi hotspots, and Navizon’s I.T.S. nodes. It also marks the second way (that I know of) for you to be tracked via the location of your phone, whether you want to be or not. (The first requires access to your cell phone carrier, and is used for example to locate your position when you make a 911 call.)

    Inadequate privacy laws in the US allow companies to aggregate this data to know exactly what device belongs to who. That means your location can easily be tracked in real time. Non free phones may give you away in other ways as well, regardless of laws. Any laws that block sharing of information like this would be undone by CISPA.

  • Drone Use Takes Off on the Home Front

    Occupy AA stations! Three people with surgical tubing, a funnel and some gravel should be able to bring the smaller spies down.

• Civil Rights

  • TSA’s PreCheck express airport screening hinges on fragile trust

    The agent explained that her record is clean but that “someone I know has gotten into trouble or is under investigation and that it affects me,” she said. … A TSA spokesman confirmed that loss of any other E-ZPass-like government program for travelers, such as Sentri, Global Entry or Nexus, will have similar repercussions for their PreCheck membership. “If your card is revoked by CBP, you’re no longer eligible for PreCheck,” says Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman.

    Guilt by association is a typical police state tactic used to keep people helpless and divided. So are restrictions on travel for people who have not been accused or convicted of any crimes.

  • The TSA’s mission creep is making the US a police state

    In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying “people [who] want to travel by some other means” have that right. (In other words: if you don’t like it, don’t fly.) But now TSA is invading travel by other means, too. No surprise, really: as soon as she established groping in airports, Napolitano expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. … “Don’t like the new rules for mass transit? Then drive.” Except even that doesn’t work anymore. Earlier this month, the VIPRs came out again in Virginia and infested the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, also known as the stretch of Interstate 64 connecting the cities of Hampton and Norfolk. … Local commenters at the Travel Underground forums reported delays of 90 minutes. … If you don’t like it, walk. And remember to be respectfully submissive to any TSA agents or police you encounter in your travels, especially now that the US supreme court has ruled mass strip-searches are acceptable …

  • May Day Directory: Occupy General Strike In Over 115 Cities

    Need a break from work? Take a long weekend for May Day by taking Monday and Tuesday off.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Why Preserving an Open Internet is Now the Most Important Thing in the World

    An Open Internet is increasingly absolutely essential to freedom of communications, freedom to search, freedom to learn, and just about every other freedom you or I could list. Communications. Information. It is through these concepts, these realities, that innovations are created, problems are solved, dictators are vanquished, and the world advances. And similarly, it is through control of these constructs, restrictions on information and communications, that ideas are crushed, lives are enslaved, and dictators flourish.

• Education Watch

  • Free Open Source Software in Oregon Government

    instead of adopting Open Source governments in Oregon continue to mostly shun it or use it as little as possible. A good example is non-profit FreeGeek has a contract with the City of Portland in which they get used City computers and hardware and refurbish them and install Ubuntu but must distribute those refurbished machines to local schools however the Portland Public School system has not yet requested any of these computers for their classrooms and students. How can local schools do teacher layoffs and cut programs yet turn down free computers and technology that would save the millions from their budget over time.

• ACTA

  • EDRI: ACTA – If You Think We’ve Won, We’ve Lost

    Following the announcement of David Martin, the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in charge of the ACTA dossier in the European Parliament, that he will advise his colleagues to vote against the proposal, a widespread assumption appears to have developed that ACTA is now dead. This is not just wrong. It is dangerous and wrong. … [we can assume it's over and relax or] we do our duty for European democracy and maintain our pressure right up until the vote. And then we win. And Europe wins.

  • Liberals and Democrats Announce Rejection of ACTA

    Everyone should do this.

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