06.20.12

Links – NATO protest slapdown, Nokia collapsing.

Posted in Site News at 3:36 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• 500 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.

• Innovation under Austerity

  This is a transcription of a speech given by Eben Moglen at the 2012 Freedom to Connect conference in Washington DC on May 22, 2012.

• Bat rescuer awarded $6.1 million in libel suit

  A former intern accused of cyberstalking a Mineral Wells bat sanctuary and its president was ordered to pay about $6.1 million in damages Thursday for what a judge called egregious, malicious and intentional defamatory statements she spread across the Internet, court documents say. … The videos and statements, the suit said, were pervasive on the Internet, using “robots” to game Google and other search engines so the defamatory material would appear high in search results.

Security

• Microsoft XML vulnerability under active exploitation

  These attacks are being distributed both via malicious web pages intended for Internet Explorer users and through Office documents. Users running Windows XP up to and including Windows 7 are known to be vulnerable.

  Nothing changes in Windows land.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Newly Released FBI “Domestic Terrorism” Training on Anarchists, Environmentalists, Show COINTELPRO Tactics

    The FBI considers free speech and protest criminal.

  • Tribune Company Moves to Seize Occupied Chicago Tribune’s Website

    they wanted the paper to change the font, the masthead and the paper could not be any name that began with a “T” (e.g. Occupied Chicago Times). When they realized how the company was coming after the paper, they decided to get legal representation.

  • A rehab job on the criminals in blue

  • BYRON SONNE, FOUND NOT GUILTY ON ALL CHARGES, HAS PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

    Meanwhile, in Canada, another activist charged with terrorism is free from jail, curfews and not using a cell phone that lasted two years.

  • Attorney: “NATO 3″ Activists Detained on Terror Charges in Chicago Are Victims of Police Entrapment

    … they were set up by government informants who planted the explosives. Supporters also say police seized equipment that was used for brewing homemade beer.

  • Occupy Journalists Stopped, Searched, Handcuffed & Interrogated at Gunpoint

    Under cover of the night around twelve police cars stopped five journalists when they were heading back to where they are staying in Chicago during the NATO summit. All five have been covering protests against the NATO summit for the past few days. … Chicago PD took the journalists’ hard drives and slammed them against “running boards four or five times.” They took Pool’s alternate batteries and slammed them too. Content recorded by the journalists was deleted from Ustream. … The episode was not an isolated incident. @Ghostpickles and @Korgasm who have both been covering Occupy since the early days, reported being interrogated by CPD with others in the middle of the night. … The Chicago police, possibly with help from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI or other federal agencies, appear to be working off a list of “suspected” people or spaces where they must go “check in” on what is happening simply to ensure all is safe.

  • CPD, FBI & Secret Service Claim NATO 3 Came to Chicago to Commit ‘Terrorist Acts of Violence’

    Deutsch called the investigation, targeting and raid of these activists “worse than entrapment.” According to the NLG, two police informants infiltrated the group. The NLG believes “they’re the ones who provoked this and they’re the ones,” who committed the “illegal activity” and had the “illegal materials.”
    Additionally, they said the informants didn’t provide the materials and convince the activists to engage in some plot. The activists did not take the bait. The informants simply left the materials in the apartment ahead of the raid so the materials would be there for police to find.

  • Thousands march to oppose police repression in run-up to NATO summit

    supporters of three men arrested in a Wednesday night raid at the Bridgeport apartment of Occupy Chicago activists were gathering at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California for the arrestees’ noon bail hearing. Each was slapped with a bond of $1.5 million; Cook County States’ Attorney Anita Alvarez had originally asked for $5 million bonds for each, and trotted out a litany of charges deployed in the first-ever use of the state’s anti-terrorism statutes …the afternoon’s boisterous but peaceful protest marches marred by sweeping police violence. … Neither action was permitted, in keeping with Occupy Chicago’s standing opposition to the city’s ‘Sit Down & Shut Up” protest ordinances, which were tightened earlier this year to make it virtually impossible to stage permitted actions without at least a million dollars in insurance, massive ‘marshall’ presence, and a commitment to register all signs and banners with the authorities — draconian restrictions on free speech and civil liberties that the Occupy movement and its allies have refused to embrace. The police used batons, bikes and their fists to beat people and push protesters back repeatedly today, with medics reporting numerous injuries.

  • Activists Charged With Providing Material Support for Terrorism Ahead of NATO Summit

    The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. … the three activists remaining — Bryan Church, Jarred Chase, Brent Betterly — appear in the video posted of police threatening violence during the NATO summit. It now seems clear that police are charging them in retaliation for posting the video.

  • Activists Disappeared Ahead of NATO Summit Continue To Be Held Without Charge

    the Chicago police had “disappeared” activists. … The local news reporters and journalists have been utter cowards. Because the police would not admit the police carried out a raid, the media refused to “confirm” the story. They instead ran stories that communicated lawyers or protesters were alleging.

  • Will Occupy activists get a fair trial?

    OVER 70 criminal cases against Occupy Portland activists remain in limbo following continued attempts by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s office to deprive defendants of the right to a jury trial and court-appointed legal counsel.
    Over the past several months, prosecutors have specifically sought to avoid allowing defendants to exercise such rights by repeatedly changing the charges filed against them.

  See original crack down and mass arrests

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • 90 Percent of People Want Labeling on Engineered Food, But We Still Don’t Have it: Why Is that?

• Finance

  • Using US courts to go after the poor

    Vulture capitalist (to use the usual term) Singer, who wants to use US courts to force poor countries to pay debts they defaulted on, wants help from the US Congress.

  • The Austerity Agenda

    the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

  • Chicago Factory Occupiers Form Worker Cooperative

• Anti-Trust

  • Nokia CEO: Our Microsoft Phones Just Aren’t Selling That Well

    “We aren’t getting the traction we prefer.” … Elop admitted that Microsoft was giving Nokia “specific support” so it can drop the price.

    The trash bag blamed retail salespeople.

  • Nokia to end ‘Meltemi’ effort for low-end smartphones

    One of the casualties of Nokia’s latest cuts is Meltemi, the company’s effort to create a new Linux-based operating system for low-end smartphones. The project was aimed at offering smartphones at prices that neither Android or Windows Phone could easily reach…

    Is there a reason they can’t do the same thing with MeGo?

  • A questionable source reports,
    

    Nokia to End “Meltemi” Effort for Low-End Smartphones

    Nokia is also exploring alternatives for another of its development environments, known as Qt, which today is used largely in embedded devices. “We’re fans of Qt, and we’ll continue to support it in the near term, but are being open about looking for opportunities which may be best for this developer framework,” Kerris said.

  • U.S. Probes Cable for Limits on Net Video

    The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video … investigators are taking a particularly close look at the data caps that pay-TV providers like Comcast and AT&T Inc. have used to deal with surging video traffic on the Internet. … Comcast fanned those fears in March, when it said that videos viewed on its own Xfinity app on Microsoft’s Xbox wouldn’t be counted against subscribers’ data caps in the same way as videos viewed using Netflix, Hulu or other apps

    This article is from Fox News and is highly slanted towards the interests of monopolists. The only reason we are hearing about this is because Microsoft’s interests are clashing with those of Fox.

• Censorship

  • EU Governments Push Global Alliance for Net Censorship

    In an unanimous decision, EU Member States have decided to promote website censorship at the global scale under the pretext of tackling child pornography.

  • Retired Judge Joins Fight Against DOJ’s ‘Outrageous’ Seizures in Megaupload Case

  • Lauren WeinsteinRegarding +Tim Bray ‘s suggestion for an HTTP 451 response (http://j.mp/KRyC2R) for “legally restricted resources”

    personally I think it’s a fine idea (and I suspect Ray would have been at least amused, even though he pretty much despised the Internet to his dying day).

  • 9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians

    The school backed down again, what a good lesson.

• Privacy

  • Outrage as credit agency plans to mine Facebook data

    Facebook’s business model is selling people out this way. You don’t have to be on Facebook for them to spy on you, your friends report your activity.

  • Microsoft patents ‘emotional database’ advertising service

• Civil Rights

  • Microsoft Sorry For Gaffe That Gives New Meaning to Norwegian Wood

    Loud music with a disembodied voice rapping goofy lyrics while a half-dozen women in shorts dance in front of a roomful of bemused Norweigian software geeks, who have each paid about $1,500 to attend the three-day event. … The offending couplet: “I’m a computer gen-i-us / The words micro and soft don’t apply to my penis” On the teleprompter, genius is misspelled “genious” and the words “(or vagina)” are added below “penis” in the spirit of gender equality.

    More monkey business from Microsoft. The cost of this kind of “training” is inevitably passed on in the cost of good sold and makes us all pay the Windows Tax.

  • S-COMM to be implemented in Massachusetts over state objections

    over 70 percent of the people deported through S-COMM have never been convicted of a crime or have only minor offenses such as traffic violations. Furthermore, increases racial profiling and causes undocumented immigrants—who are more often the victims of crimes than the perpetrators—to be afraid of contacting police in an emergency situation.

  • US government’s right to torture

    The Supreme Court upheld the US government’s right to torture with impunity for “national security”.
    It also abandoned the rights of prisoners in Guantanamo, even though most of them are acknowledged to have been imprisoned for no reason. Why should anyone hold the US government in higher esteem than the Chinese government?

• Education Watch

  • States to Residents: Forget Promises to Restore School Funding

    “Over and over, we heard from our elected officials that this was the worst recession since the Great Depression, and they had no choice but to cut school funding,” he said. “We were told that once the economy improves, our funding would be restored. But this year, when they did have a choice, a very clear choice, they decided that tax cuts were more important than education.” … In at least 30 states, funding for K-12 education was lower in fiscal year 2012 than in 2008, despite growing student populations. …

• Network Neutrality

  • Frequency-Hopping Radio Wastes Less Spectrum

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Judge tentatively pulls the plug on Apple v. Motorola

  • Copyrights

    • Villages Furious about Copyright Fees for Folk Songs

    • Fair Use, Art, Swiss Cheese and Me

      Copyright maximalists threaten to destroy art museums and their ludicrous demands have made it all the way up to the US Supreme Court. Libraries will be next.

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