Ubuntu To Ship on 5% of All PCs Sold Next Year

“We sell millions of PCs with HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus, Acer,” Mark Shuttleworth recently told Bussiness Insider website. ”We expect to ship close to 20 million PCs in the next year.’

Linux accessibility – what is it and why does it matter

I will not completely go into detail about why I use Linux. Suffice it to say that if you are a blind Windows user, you are, for the most part, a target of big name companies who make extremely pricey software products (namely screen readers and screen magnifiers as well as other technologies) which allow you the “privilege” of using your computer system. … Ever installed a system with your eyes closed, literally? … As of right now, at least to my knowledge, one can completely install Debian (see the Debian accessibility page), Ubuntu, Vinux (a Ubuntu derivative designed for blind and visually impaired users), Trisquel and Arch Linux (via Chris Brannon’s TalkingArch ISO image).

Google Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most used browser

Hardware

• Lenovo dumps classic keyboard on new ThinkPad laptops

  I currently own an HP Envy laptop. I like the machine overall, but typing on its island-style keyboard is a frustrating chore, one that inevitably triggers a string of typos that don’t occur when I use a classic keyboard.

Health/Nutrition

• Media Coverage of Mad Cow: USDA Calls “Misleading,” Columbia Journalism Review Calls “Sane”.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Murder for fun and “morale”: Shocking video of lethal Israeli attack on sleeping Palestinian prisoners

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Watchdog: Huge Spike in Cancers, Fertility Problems Linked to Chemicals in Household Items

  Chemicals in common household products may be behind the huge rise in cancers, diabetes and obesity, falling fertility, and an increased number of neurological development, the European Environment Agency (EEA) reported yesterday.

  See also Harmful household chemicals must be banned – health before commerce

• Finally… Solo Farmer Fights Monsanto and Wins

  Some farmers have been able to sue Monsanto for contaminating their crops with GM. There are hundreds of others who lost everything when sued for patent infringement.

Finance

• FACEBOOK’S TAX DODGE STANDS TO MAKE BILLIONS FOR COMPANY AND ZUCKERBERG

  The stock option tax loophole is the only provision of the tax code that allows companies to deduct money for costs without actually spending any money. It allows Facebook to declare to shareholders and potential investors that their expenses remain low, while at the same time declaring to the IRS that those same shares cost them $5 billion and write those higher costs off as a tax deduction. To their shareholders and the stock market, Facebook will present itself as highly profitable, while their tax return will show the opposite.

  See also, Senate Floor Statement Facebook’s $16 Billion Stock Option Tax Deduction. The worst fraud of all is the ridiculous valuation, created by the usual Microsoft/NASDAQ press tools.

• Facebook underwriters prop up stock as it nears break-even mark

  The practice is pretty standard during IPOs, especially high-profile ones like Facebook. The big banks buy into a wave of selling as a way to prevent their customers from suffering big losses.
  The syndicate of underwriters led by Morgan Stanley helped prop up shares after the Nasdaq Stock Market experienced technical problems processing trades.

  None of that should be legal.

• How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks

  Trashy ways to scrape the bottom of the barrel even harder.

Anti-Trust

• Break the Microsoft Monopoly

  sign this petition that pressures the relevant authorities in the US and EU (FTC, EU trade commission) to issue regulations that force hardware vendors to offer alternative OS software in order to break this monopoly for good!

• Hewlett-Packard Said To Consider Cutting Up To 25,000 Jobs

• No respite for HP, Dell in Windows 8: BMO

  Windows 8 will prove to be a disappointment

  It’s Vista with an even nastier face and more digital handcuffs.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban

  The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.

Censorship

• If you are using non free software, you might not really see what’s published here.

Civil Rights

• Noam Chomsky: Plutonomy and the precariat: On the history of the US economy in decline

  The current US economy is built on ‘growing worker insecurity’ – people who are too busy and poor to make demands. … For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

  Lots of missed opportunities are listed, but the Occupy movement is reason to hope that people won’t let themselves be walked on.

• Colonized by Corporations

  The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Technology Patent Wars Sign of Robust Innovation, Patent Office Claims

  “Passage of the AIA has provided an opportunity to restart long-stalled discussions with our foreign counterparts toward substantive harmonization that will help U.S. businesses succeed in the global business environment. … I don’t think there is any reason to believe that either copyright or patent lawsuits of the kind that we’re seeing in the so-called smartphone wars are a sign of stifling technological innovation. … [litigants] have intellectual property positions resulting from massive investments. They seek to enforce those positions, level the playing field in some way, and you have a dust-up like we’re seeing right now. I do not believe that it’s a sign that there’s anything at all wrong with the innovation environment in the U.S. In fact, I think it’s a byproduct of a very healthy overall innovation environment. These things happen. They sort themselves out.”

  The US Patent Office is hopelessly corrupt, insane and self serving. This explanation begs the question of software as an invention worthy of a monopoly grant and the validity of the 600,000 patents on backlog. A claim to business methods is turned into a “position” which is good language if you think patents should be traded as a commodity, but that contradicts the protecting innovators excuse. People in other countries should take notice of the obvious fact that US Patents are used for US protectionism. People in the US should notice that this protectionism is mostly serving the interest of a few US companies at the expense of other US companies owned by less wealthy individuals. The net result is that the US market is a backwater of inferior goods.

• Copyrights

  • Admitted file-swapper begs Supreme Court for help

    Dr. Tenenbaum has had years of his life wasted and faces a $675,000 judgment that is completely unjust and makes him a slave for the rest of his life because he admits to having shared a few files.

  • Oracle v Google Judge Is A Programmer!

    “I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?”

    I do not think this will end well for Oracle.

  • They’re Not ‘Orphan Works’, They’re ‘Hostage Works’

    In the metaphor of the romantic author, the works he creates are his children, born of his labor and genius. … We reflexively begin to believe that orphan works need the kind of protection that society provides to abandoned children. … What these works need are “special forces” that can free them from the constraints placed on them by the combination of the regulatory effects of copyright and the lack of a locatable owner who can grant permission to avoid the consequences of the regulation.

Will “8″ Fly or is it Cripple-ware?

Non free software is always cripple/mal/spyware.

Science

• Emotion Can Shut Down High-Level Mental Processes Without Our Knowledge, in Our Native Language

  The psychologists made this discovery by asking English-speaking Chinese people whether word pairs were related in meaning. Some of the word pairs were related in their Chinese translations. Although not consciously acknowledging a relation, measurements of electrical activity in the brain revealed that the bilingual participants were unconsciously translating the words. However, uncannily, this activity was not observed when the English words had a negative meaning.

Hardware

• Chuckle. No One Wants Small Expensive Computers.

  2012 will blow away records for tablets shipped in 2011 and M$ will be a no-show.

  Don’t expect Windows on ARM tablets till 2013. A few companies are going to launch expensive WinTel tablets

• The Setup, Eric S Raymond

  The interesting details about my desktop setup are the peripherals. I like Model-M-style clicky keyboards (I’m typing on a Unicomp Model M). I prefer trackballs over mice and use a Logitech TrackMan. I like lots of vertical pixels for my Emacs window, so I’m rocking a Samsung SyncMaster 1100DF at 1800×1440 with 120dpi. My road machine is a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 … I like intricate music playing while I hack (Liquid Tension Experiment playing now).

Security

• IAmA a malware coder and botnet operator, AMA

  The author says a lot of interesting things in comments. Of course, it’s all Windows.

• Lauren Lauren Weinstein: More details on the .secure TLD proposal

  You may recall my posting yesterday (http://j.mp/Ku8pEd) where I suggested that the .secure TLD proposal is fundamentally flawed for many reasons. The CTO of the company involved contacted me this morning, pointing at their blog with more details: http://unhandled.com/ — After reviewing this information, which includes their proposals for a broader “domain policy framework,” I’m forced to stand by my earlier characterization. … The concept of .secure is essentially 180 degrees away from the model I believe we should be working towards. Rather than centralizing security, we need to be distributing it…

Defence/Police/Aggression

• U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam

  The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• US Citizens: Support the End Polluter Welfare Act

• Warm water marine species spreading northwards into British waters

• Decades of Data Show Spring Advancing Faster Than Experiments Suggest

• Greenpeace: Demand the White House publicly release all information around the Gulf disaster and stop offshore drilling

  It’s not too late. The government has yet to announce the amount of money BP owes for the damages caused by the disaster.

  The US government blocked independent scientists, stolen samples and concealed the results of their own limited studies with lame excuses of safety and proper investigation. State and local governments, for the most part, were bought out with DHS and BP money for toys and advertising campaigns. Demand better!

Finance

• Eurozone crisis: Greek left leader renounces bailout deal

  Tsipras said he would … “end the agreements of subservience”. The signing of the loan had not been “a salvation but a tragedy”

  Good for Greece.

• Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional Corruption – Is Killing the Economy

• Want to stop banks gambling on food prices? Try closing the casino

  Roosevelt’s administration came up with a simple solution: position limits. If you were not a participant in the food business – neither a farmer nor a baker – you could trade no more than 5,000 futures contracts. This prescription worked well, and endured until the late 1990s, when position limit exemptions were quietly granted to a number of large investment banks. Wall Street subsequently rushed into commodities, and the world is still reeling.

Anti-Trust

• Firefox on Windows on ARM – Microsoft Says No

  you don’t get those privileges (certain API access) unless you’re the default browser and I think that’s deeply unfair (a post for later,) but at least we’re able to build a competitive browser and ship it to Windows users on x86 chips. But on ARM chips, Microsoft gives IE access special APIs absolutely necessary for building a modern browser that it won’t give to other browsers

  Microsoft has played API games forever, what’s new is that they are pretending it’s OK and are trying to extend their death grip to ARM [2].

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Goldman Looks to Hire Social Media Strategist

  The rich and powerful already have a tremendous astroturf presence, most graphically revealed in the HB Garry/Aaron Barr email spill. Techrights has covered Microsoft’s disgusting astroturf effort for years.

Censorship

• Few Companies Fight Patriot Act Gag Orders, FBI Admits

  “Thus far, there have been only four challenges to the non-disclosure requirement,” Holder wrote, “and in two of the challenges, the FBI permitted the recipient to disclose the fact that an NSL was received.” … The FBI has sent out nearly 300,000 NSLs since 2000, about 50,000 of which have been sent out since the new policy for challenging NSL gag orders went into effect. Last year alone, the FBI sent out 16,511 NSLs requesting information pertaining to 7,201 U.S. persons.

• If You Meet a Censor, Ask Them This One Question

• Dutch Judge Who Ordered Pirate Bay Links Censored Fount to be Corrupt

  … the plaintiff’s representative in the case – a professor Visser – offered commercial courses in anti-piracy, together with the judge, Chris Hensen. The plaintiff and judge were running a commercial enterprise together, one that had a direct bearing on the subject matter of the case. … It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.

• In the US, you can still say almost anything, but someone just may be listening in

  a new kind of corporate oligopoly is emerging. Coupled with increasingly controlling activities by government, often in concert with corporate interests, the new choke points threaten to re-centralize media, or at least return control to a few dominant parties. … wired-line carriers believe that they should be able to decide what bits of information get delivered in what order and at what speed, if they get delivered at all. … The serious potential for problems with wired-line broadband is nothing next to the actual situation with mobile carriers. … The copyright industries have every intention of being another [chokepoint]. … Private companies are creating their own ecosystems, with minimal regulatory interference … If you create a journalism app to be sold in the iPhone or iPad marketplace, you explicitly give Apple the right to decide whether your journalism content is acceptable under the company’s vague guidelines. … Facebook is another potential threat to independent journalism. … journalists need to upgrade their own techniques and technology when it comes to protecting sources.

  It is not surprising that one monopoly helps the other, as big publishers and telco helped Apple, because the monopolies are ultimately owned be the same few wealthy families that want to guard their relative position. What’s shameful is the willingness of our government to serve them at everyone else’s expense.

Privacy

• Stallman: CISPA ‘nearly abolishes’ the right not to be unreasonably searched

  What CISPA says as passed by the House of Representatives is any ISP, any website, any company that has some of your data in it can voluntarily hand it over to the government for a wide range of reasons …

• Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You

  if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place. … Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic military base.

  Spying on a person from miles away with a telescope is no accident, it takes pinpoint precision and advanced knowledge of the target’s location.

• http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2012/mobile-internet-censorship

  The only sensible child protection policy is sound public education and digital freedom.

Civil Rights

• Gay rights in the US, state by state

• Caught on Tape: Walker Plans for a Single Party State

  Walker: “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. . .”

  So there you have it, the attack on civil servants in Wisconsin was not motivated by budget it was politics and class warfare.

• Dell response regarding insensitive comments from Mads Christensen

  “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room. … [more tastless stuff] … the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up bitch!”.

  Dell is sorry they got caught laughing about discrimination against women in the workplace. It’s amazing how little attention this got a month ago compared to the “Virgin of Emacs.” That’s more evidence of an organized campaign around to smear RMS.

• Why Are People Resigning Before The Copyright Industries’ Will?

  When did people forget that legislators, and not corporations, have the final say over our laws?

Education Watch

• How Private Bottling Companies Water-Down Education to Boost Profits

  Nestlé Waters North America, the organization’s main sponsor, is the last entity that should be empowered to educate the public about responsible water use. When you consider the bottled water behemoth ‘s track record of hogging global water supplies and profiting from them, Project WET’s supposed mission is a slap in the face to any community that has had its water muscled away by Nestlé.

• Reframing the Doomday Budget Discussion

  After years of hard cuts, Califorinia’s universities are starting to shut down programs as they face even worse. Students are facing more tuition hikes.

• Ninth Circuit Reaffirms Ruling That Trainee Teachers Not Intended as “Highly Qualified” Under NCLB eg: Teach for America

  A federal appeals panel yesterday re-affirmed its September 2010 ruling that the U.S. Department of Education unlawfully diluted the standard of teacher owed every student in the country under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) when it issued a 2002 regulation classifying teachers in training as “highly qualified.”

• Weekly Update : The Philadelphia horror story, no more school libraries in DC if the school chancellor has anything to do with it, other privatizing insanity and the push back

• More on the WSPTA Convention: Oops, the new teacher evaluation system would not impact charter schools

  So, we see that “evaluations” are mostly a tool to punish people opposed to charter schools.

• Bringing the PTA into the 21st Century or What I learned at the Washington State PTA Convention

  Next year, the convention will be in Bellevue, a stone’s throw from Seattle. A decision with no regard for other regions attending. Bellevue is also more expensive than Seattle and farther away from SeaTac airport. I guess everyone can take a limo. (Or is it eat cake?) So how do we get the WSPTA into the 21st century and relevant again? How do we encourage and support parents, teachers and students to be involved? How does the WSPTA get the diversity of membership that it keeps attempting to obtain? First we do it with the technology that we have available and we take a look at how we handle our state and national elections. If this is to be a democratic process that is accessible to all, let’s make that happen.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Keeping the Internet Neutral

  A good history of what is wrong with US internet access.

Digital Handcuffs

• Technology should help us share, not constrain us

  Printed books let us do that. I couldn’t do it with most commercial ebooks; it’s not “allowed”. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict reading, so it simply won’t allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are “not allowed” for ebooks.

TPP

• Live from the Trenches: TPP Negotiations in Dallas

  The public is excluded from meaningful monitoring or input.

• Party ends badly for U.S. trade reps, federal agents

  The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and “Haversall” continued: “I’d like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right.” … Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.

  Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed “delegates” (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted “TPP! TPP! TPP!” for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.

  The look of panic on the corporate spokes drone in this video is almost as funny as US Trade representative Kirk’s “We came, we saw, we shopped”.

• EFF petition: No Backroom Deals to Regulate the Internet: Speak Out Against the Trans-Pacific Partnership!

• Before and After SOPA

  The defeat, even if only temporary, of SOPA and PIPA was surely one key factor in the sudden upswelling of protests against ACTA, which until that point had seemed almost certain to be ratified in the EU. The actions against SOPA and ACTA have led to renewed analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), currently being negotiated behind closed doors in Dallas.

  Let’s make these defeats permanent.

Android Not Only Selling Well, but Now Has The Largest Installed Base of Smart Phones

Walmart.com’s Best-selling Tablets

Hardware

• New Dell Ubuntu ultrabooks a step in the right direction for Linux support

  … the company needs to be careful to pick components that are supported well upstream. What would be ideal is if Dell started encouraging its hardware suppliers to open their drivers and merge them into the mainline kernel tree. That would be infinitely more constructive for advancing desktop Linux than any preinstallation scheme.

Anti-Trust

• Nokia hit with class action lawsuit; fraud claims ‘without merit,’ it says

  Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd … filed a class action suit against Finnish mobile giant Nokia yesterday claiming that the company made false and/or misleading statements to investors after it indicated that it believed the switch to the Windows Phone operating system “would reverse Nokia’s trends worldwide and dramatically improve its share of the U.S. market,” [but knew] that such a turnaround wouldn’t happen; the new Lumia 900 LTE model was glitchy and poorly accepted and its migration “not going as well as represented,” according to the complaint.

• Microsoft To Block Competing Browsers In Windows 8, RT Edition

  “Windows RT will have two environments, a Windows Classic environment and a Metro environment for apps. However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment.

• Windows on ARM Users Need Browser Choice Too

  Mozilla’s response is unnecessarily restrained. Microsoft has dropped the bomb on them, so they might as well give up Windows.

• Microsoft bans Firefox on ARM-based Windows, Mozilla says

  [ARM] chips have new requirements for security and power management, and Microsoft is the only one who can meet those needs.

  Only Microsoft can manage to bring insecurity and poor power management to a platform that everyone else has been using without problems for the last decade.

• FSF statement on jury’s partial verdict in Oracle v Google

  Were it grounded in reality, Oracle’s claim that copyright law gives them proprietary control over any software that uses a particular functional API would be terrible for free software and programmers everywhere. It is an unethical and greedy interpretation created with the express purpose of subjugating as many computer users as possible, and is particularly bad in this context because it comes at a time when the sun has barely set on the free software community’s celebration of Java as a language newly suitable for use in the free world. Fortunately, the claim is not yet reality, and we hope Judge Alsup will keep it that way.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Corporate Media’s Attempt to Kill the Occupy Movement

  The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Netherlands first country in Europe with net neutrality

Digital Handcuffs

• Why Tech Review is ditching its iPad edition

  Jason Pontin, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, explains why his magazine deprecated its iPad app and went to “a simple RSS feed in a river of news,” and why it’s moving to “HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone.

• DVDs and Blu-rays will now carry two unskippable government warnings

  This is a ridiculous escalation of rhetoric by scores of Orwellian US agencies. What else can we expect from groups with such unblushingly fascist emblems and an idiotic motto like, “Protection is our Trademark.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Google Demands $4 Billion A year From Microsoft

  Microsoft’s years of bullying smaller companies into patent submission is about to come back and bite them in the butt. Today in court Google demanded $4 billion a year in patent fees for the Xbox 360 or stop selling it in the United States. … Google recently purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in what a lot of analysts saw as a means for Google to go after Microsoft in retaliation for the shady business practices Microsoft has been guilty of for years.

  This counter attack is defensive. Rather than validating the patent system, it shows how wasteful it is. I’m looking forward to a string of such lawsuits against every product Microsoft has.

• Honeywell’s Lawsuit Against Nest: The Perfect Example Of Legacy Players Using Patents To Stifle Innovation

  I would not want an internet connected, non free thermostat but this is a good example of the harm caused by software patents.

• SGI Back From The Dead (Again) And Suing Tons Of Companies For Patent Infringement

  Back in 2006, we noted that what remained of SGI had indicated that it planned to resurrect the company by going patent troll. However, we thought we’d avoided that ignoble result when SGI sold most of its assets to Rackable for a mere $25 million three years ago. Silly us for assuming those patents would just go away.
  While Rackable changed its name to Silicon Graphics International… the original company actually retained the patents, and renamed itself Graphics Properties Holdings … In the last year alone it has sued Apple, HTC, LG, RIM, Samsung, Sony, Acer, ASUS, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, Vizio and Motorola Mobility.

  History lesson, SGI was killed by Microsoft mole, Richard Belluzzo. I wonder why Nokia is not on the list.

• Copyrights

  • Key Ruling In The Fight Over Artists Getting Their Copyrights Back Suggests The Labels May Be In Big Trouble

    under current copyright law [1978], content creators can “terminate” the assignment of their copyright after 35 years and regain the copyright. This is a right that cannot be negotiated away or given to anyone but direct heirs … The judge in the case has pretty decisively ruled against the publishers and said that partial copyright owners still can exercise their termination rights…

How a Dream PetHouse turned into an expensive nightmare

Scammers make “free” games for children that sucker them into spending parent’s real money. Children and adults alike should avoid non free software.

Lib-Ray: An Open HD Video Standard for Free Culture and Independent Film

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

• Ex-CIA Officer Who Destroyed Waterboarding Videos: Torturers “Disgusted” at Being Labeled “Torturers”

  … he worried about the global repercussions if the footage leaked out and wanted to get “rid of some ugly visuals.”

  Most people don’t like the way torture looks.

• Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment

  The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.

  The rocket riders have arrived in Lon-don, En-gal-land.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

  …it was not the “unexpectedly high” tsunami that caused the accident. Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 remained intact, even though they were damaged to the same extent as the other four reactors by the earthquakes and tsunami. The difference was that they had a source of electricity through the air-cooled emergency diesel engine that had been was installed ad hoc by the management because they wanted to save money when the government demanded increased back up from two to three emergency generator sets.

  This article, written by a MIT trained reactor engineer, also details the obvious lies told by the operator and government and explains why the portable generators did not work.

• Former GM Executive Bob Lutz Slams The GOP’s ‘Pure Fiction, Knee-Jerk’ Hatred Of Electric Cars

  “The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it.”

  US republicans are insane and increasingly dangerous. See also, plutocrat Donald Trump’s war against wind power.

• ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets

• Let’s Talk About the Real Cost of Dirty Power: AEP and 3,200 Pollution Deaths

  The dangerous air pollution generated last year by the twenty-six coal-fired power plants owned wholly or in part by AEP contributed to as many as 3,200 deaths, over 20,000 asthma attacks and incidents, over 2,000 hospital and emergency room visits and over 1,000,000 lost work-days …

• Former BP engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill

  An engineer deleted text messages from his cell phone that show that BP knew it was lying about oil flowrates and also knew that their silly “top kill” would fail. Top kill would fail at flow rates greater than the official BP lie rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The engineer knew the rate was over 15,000 barrels a day and everyone knew the actual rate was closer to 50,000 barrels a day. It will be interesting to learn if this employee even had control of his company cell phone.

Finance

• Campaigners claim World Bank helps facilitate land grabs in Africa

• The Lehman Bankruptcy Docs (Buy LEH!)

  How awesome is this treasure trove of emails, documents, files et. al placed online by the NY Fed? … Who was the author of this steaming piece of shit, and where is he today? Why, he is Patrick Pinschmidt, and he is a Senior Policy Advisor at U.S. Treasury Department! (You could not make up stuff this un-fucking-believable even if you tried).

Anti-Trust – Microsoft Defeats/Bribes B&N

• Barnes & Noble Press Release

  Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

  It is outrageous that Microsoft was allowed to inflict such costs on B&N that they would agree to such a deal. Under those circumstances, it is not fair to call this a sell out, it’s extortion. The deal gives money to B&N but surrendering to patent royalties is an insult to the rest of the world and Microsoft will swiftly ruin the ebook business.

• Microsoft teams up with Barnes and Noble on ebooks

  Neil McDonald of the consultancy Gartner said that the primary motivation for Microsoft was to get the Nook to use the Windows operating system.

• Microsoft’s E-Book Deal With Barnes and Noble Has Familiar Plot

  Bing search engine and partner Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) have captured nearly one-third of the Internet search market, but Microsoft’s online services business still lost $479 million last quarter. Nokia, its premier partner for Windows Phone, sold more than 2 million Lumia smartphones, but last quarter it still reported a $1.2 billion net loss.

  Will someone please put a stop to this blatant use of monopoly rents to expand an abusive monopoly and deprive the world of both first rate software and electronic books? Barnes and Noble’s case indicates that the whole case was about crippling Android devices, by eliminating “computer like” features and loading all of them with an uncompetitive royalty.

• Oracle-Google verdict signals need for copyright reform

• Oracle v. Google and the Dangerous Implications of Treating APIs as Copyrightable

  significant outstanding questions remain, including whether copyright can in fact apply (the judge alone will decide this) and whether Google made a legal fair use of those APIs (we believe it did).

• 
  From the Courtroom: Oracle v. Google, Day 1 of Patent Phase ~pj – Updated 7Xs- Partial Verdict; Oracle Wins Nothing That Matters

• Evidence of paid anti-Google bias in patent “news” coverage is troubling

  Yesterday it was revealed that Oracle has hired Mr. Mueller to “work together for the long haul” on “competition related issues,” of which FRAND law was the only provided example. Mueller claims this is a “very recent” relationship, but by his own admission he and Oracle have been discussing his employment for a long time … We don’t want to impugn his word, so … it’s not Mr. Mueller’s intent that should be questioned, but the results.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Is ‘America Revealed’–or PBS?

  The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.

• ALEC fights coal ash protections on polluters’ behalf

  Embroiled in controversy for its role in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws highlighted in the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American Legislative Exchange Council also worked to block federal regulation of toxic power plant waste that’s contaminating groundwater supplies across the country — and it turns out that the group has close ties to major coal ash polluters.

Privacy

• Why I lapsed my FitBit subscription

  Here’s a funny story – friend of mine signed up for an account and started “friending” many of her RL friends on the site. Which exposed all of us to daily “sexual activity, moderate, 2h 11m” reports. Sure, she should have been more vigilant about her data, but alas, now she’s stuck with it being recorded and available. No way for her to remove those from the site.

• Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

  Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists? … they sure didn’t expect to be subjected to accusations, extreme pat-downs, and most importantly, to be missing $300 in cash.

  They did not think the money was more important than the humilliation but they were angry that the TSA’s cameras were too fuzzy to see who stole the money.

• To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

  a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays … Imagine if you read terms of service and end user license agreements too.

  So, by not regulating data sharing, society puts an impossible burden on everyone.

• To Facebook You’re Worth $80.95

  What’s interesting is not the smoke and mirrors valuation fraud, it’s the disgusting attitude about selling people’s private information.

• FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites – now

  CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory. … The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

  It’s time to remove CALEA.

Civil Rights

• US citizens: Tell Congress: Stop the Corporate Attack on Our Rights. End Forced Arbitration

Education Watch

• Washington Post’s Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby

  the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC. Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

  I did not know that the Washington Post ran for profit universites, a surprising twist on the resignation of Melinda Gates last year over an private education scandal. The Washington Post should be considered controlled opposition in many areas as most mainstream press is.

• School vouchers and the religious subversion of church-state separation

  You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

  The largest religious school groupp to have taken advantage of state subsidized religious instruction in the US is actually Islamic.

• Mass student strike in Quebec continues

  Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. … student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. … The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.

  The merger of student and labor interests terrifies the 1% because it effectively breaks their power over the rest of us.

• Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85%

  Severe and chronic trauma (such as living with an alcoholic parent, or watching in terror as your mom gets beat up) causes toxic stress in kids. Toxic stress damages kid’s brains. When trauma launches kids into flight, fight or fright mode, they cannot learn. It is physiologically impossible. … this “discipline with dignity” stuff is, well, useless. Punishing misbehavior just doesn’t work. You’re simply adding trauma to an already traumatized kid. … Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. “We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.”

Copyrights

• “FRAND is a FRAUD” Joint statement by FSFE and FSF US on UK Open Standards consultation

• The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

• Nina Paley at BLIP Legal Hackathon

  Nina Paley introduces the concept of Intellectual Disobedience, where people use works as they see fit regardless of what publishers and lawyers want.

• ACTA

  • Pirate Party Presents ACTA Alternative to European Parliament

How a Dream PetHouse turned into an expensive nightmare

Scammers make “free” games for children that sucker them into spending parent’s real money. Children and adults alike should avoid non free software.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

• Ex-CIA Officer Who Destroyed Waterboarding Videos: Torturers “Disgusted” at Being Labeled “Torturers”

  … he worried about the global repercussions if the footage leaked out and wanted to get “rid of some ugly visuals.”

  Most people don’t like the way torture looks.

• Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment

  The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.

  The rocket riders have arrived in Lon-don, En-gal-land.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Fukushima: Probability theory is unsafe

  …it was not the “unexpectedly high” tsunami that caused the accident. Reactors No. 5 and No. 6 remained intact, even though they were damaged to the same extent as the other four reactors by the earthquakes and tsunami. The difference was that they had a source of electricity through the air-cooled emergency diesel engine that had been was installed ad hoc by the management because they wanted to save money when the government demanded increased back up from two to three emergency generator sets.

  This article, written by a MIT trained reactor engineer, also details the obvious lies told by the operator and government and explains why the portable generators did not work.

• Former GM Executive Bob Lutz Slams The GOP’s ‘Pure Fiction, Knee-Jerk’ Hatred Of Electric Cars

  “The unfortunate thing is that because electric cars are very associated with the left-wing environmental green movement to combat global warming and reduce [carbon dioxide], the idea of vehicle electrification triggers this visceral reaction on the part of conservatives — which is, if it’s electric it must be a product of the left-wing, Democratic enviro-political machine, therefore we hate it.”

  US republicans are insane and increasingly dangerous. See also, plutocrat Donald Trump’s war against wind power.

• ALEC Says It Plans To Craft Legislation To Take Down State Renewable Energy Targets

• Let’s Talk About the Real Cost of Dirty Power: AEP and 3,200 Pollution Deaths

  The dangerous air pollution generated last year by the twenty-six coal-fired power plants owned wholly or in part by AEP contributed to as many as 3,200 deaths, over 20,000 asthma attacks and incidents, over 2,000 hospital and emergency room visits and over 1,000,000 lost work-days …

• Former BP engineer charged with destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill

  An engineer deleted text messages from his cell phone that show that BP knew it was lying about oil flowrates and also knew that their silly “top kill” would fail. Top kill would fail at flow rates greater than the official BP lie rate of 5,000 barrels a day. The engineer knew the rate was over 15,000 barrels a day and everyone knew the actual rate was closer to 50,000 barrels a day. It will be interesting to learn if this employee even had control of his company cell phone.

Finance

• Campaigners claim World Bank helps facilitate land grabs in Africa

Anti-Trust – Microsoft Defeats/Bribes B&N

• Barnes & Noble Press Release

  Barnes & Noble and Microsoft have settled their patent litigation, and moving forward, Barnes & Noble and Newco will have a royalty-bearing license under Microsoft’s patents for its NOOK eReader and Tablet products. This paves the way for both companies to collaborate and reach a broader set of customers.

  It is outrageous that Microsoft was allowed to inflict such costs on B&N that they would agree to such a deal. Under those circumstances, it is not fair to call this a sell out, it’s extortion. The deal gives money to B&N but surrendering to patent royalties is an insult to the rest of the world and Microsoft will swiftly ruin the ebook business.

• Microsoft teams up with Barnes and Noble on ebooks

  Neil McDonald of the consultancy Gartner said that the primary motivation for Microsoft was to get the Nook to use the Windows operating system.

• Microsoft’s E-Book Deal With Barnes and Noble Has Familiar Plot

  Bing search engine and partner Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) have captured nearly one-third of the Internet search market, but Microsoft’s online services business still lost $479 million last quarter. Nokia, its premier partner for Windows Phone, sold more than 2 million Lumia smartphones, but last quarter it still reported a $1.2 billion net loss.

  Will someone please put a stop to this blatant use of monopoly rents to expand an abusive monopoly and deprive the world of both first rate software and electronic books? Barnes and Noble’s case indicates that the whole case was about crippling Android devices, by eliminating “computer like” features and loading all of them with an uncompetitive royalty.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Is ‘America Revealed’–or PBS?

  The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.

• ALEC fights coal ash protections on polluters’ behalf

  Embroiled in controversy for its role in passing “Stand Your Ground” laws highlighted in the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American Legislative Exchange Council also worked to block federal regulation of toxic power plant waste that’s contaminating groundwater supplies across the country — and it turns out that the group has close ties to major coal ash polluters.

Privacy

• Why I lapsed my FitBit subscription

  Here’s a funny story – friend of mine signed up for an account and started “friending” many of her RL friends on the site. Which exposed all of us to daily “sexual activity, moderate, 2h 11m” reports. Sure, she should have been more vigilant about her data, but alas, now she’s stuck with it being recorded and available. No way for her to remove those from the site.

• Seniors get the TSA runaround, lose $300

  Can you imagine an 85-year-old lady and 95-year-old retired Air Force Major in wheelchairs being treated like terrorists? … they sure didn’t expect to be subjected to accusations, extreme pat-downs, and most importantly, to be missing $300 in cash.

  They did not think the money was more important than the humilliation but they were angry that the TSA’s cameras were too fuzzy to see who stole the money.

• To Read All Of The Privacy Policies You Encounter, You’d Need To Take A Month Off From Work Each Year

  a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year — or about 30 workdays … Imagine if you read terms of service and end user license agreements too.

  So, by not regulating data sharing, society puts an impossible burden on everyone.

Civil Rights

• US citizens: Tell Congress: Stop the Corporate Attack on Our Rights. End Forced Arbitration

Education Watch

• Washington Post’s Kaplan and Other For-Profit Colleges Joined ALEC, Controversial Special Interest Lobby

  the Washington Post Company’s Kaplan for-profit college division, was, last year, a member of the controversial business advocacy group the American Legislative Exchange Council. Other major for-profit education companies also joined ALEC. Republic Report has obtained a July 2011 document showing Kaplan Higher Education and other for-profits as members of ALEC’s Education Task Force.

  I did not know that the Washington Post ran for profit universites, a surprising twist on the resignation of Melinda Gates last year over an private education scandal. The Washington Post should be considered controlled opposition in many areas as most mainstream press is.

• School vouchers and the religious subversion of church-state separation

  You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to get that using public money to fund religious schools violates the letter and spirit of the first amendment. Even the radical conservatives in today’s Federalist Society would agree that the US constitution would not allow the government to cut a check to, say, the local mosque in exchange for supplying education to local schoolchildren. That is why they invented “vouchers”: by pushing the “choice” to use government money to subsidize religion down to the parents, the government can fund religious schools while pretending that it is not.

  The largest religious school groupp to have taken advantage of state subsidized religious instruction in the US is actually Islamic.

• Mass student strike in Quebec continues

  Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. … student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. … The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.

  The merger of student and labor interests terrifies the 1% because it effectively breaks their power over the rest of us.

Copyrights

• “FRAND is a FRAUD” Joint statement by FSFE and FSF US on UK Open Standards consultation

• The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them

• ACTA

  • Pirate Party Presents ACTA Alternative to European Parliament

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.

Security

• Congressional Reps Pushing CISPA Cybersecurity Bill Don’t Even Know How To Secure Their Own Websites

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• H.R. 3523 – Letters of Support

  AT&T, Boeing, BSA, Business Roundtable, CSC, COMPTEL, CTIA – The Wireless Association, Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association, Edison Electric, EMC, Exelon, Facebook, The Financial Services Roundtable, IBM, Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, Information Technology Industry Council, Intel, Internet Security Alliance, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, National Cable & Telecommunications Association, NDIA, Oracle, Symantec, TechAmerica
  US Chamber of Commerce, US Telecom – The Broadband Association,
  Verizon

  The usual suspects. Shame on IBM.

• CISPA emerged from the House Intelligence Committee with an overwhelming vote of 17-1. …

  No, Google has not stated support for this nasty bill.

Censorship

• CISPA is SOPA 2.0: petition to stop it

• CISPA Is The New SOPA: Help Kill It

• Save the Internet from the US

• Rogers’ “Cybersecurity” Bill Is Broad Enough to Use Against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay

  allows companies or the government1 free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for “cybersecurity purposes.” Companies are encouraged to share data with the government and with one another, and the government can share data in return. … because “us[ing] cybersecurity systems” is incredibly vague, it could be interpreted to mean monitoring email, filtering content, or even blocking access to sites. A company acting on a “cybersecurity threat” would be able to bypass all existing laws, including laws prohibiting telcos from routinely monitoring communications, so long as it acted in “good faith.”

Privacy

• EFF Joins Two Coalition Letters Opposing CISPA

  Continuing our campaign against the cyberspying bill better known as CISPA, EFF has signed on to two coalition letters urging legislators to drop their support for the Rogers cybersecurity bill (HR 3523). One coalition is focused on the disastrous privacy implications of the bill, while the other identifies major government accountability issues it would introduce.

• Battle Over New Cybersecurity Bill CISPA Breaks Out Across The Web

• Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Speaks Out Against CISPA

  [It] is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world. Even though the SOPA and PIPA acts were stopped by huge public outcry, it’s staggering how quickly the US government has come back with a new, different, threat to the rights of its citizens

• ACLU: Proposed Amendments to CISPA Don’t Protect Privacy

• Stop CISPA? Cybersecurity bill adds six new co-sponsors in two days

  Despite efforts to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, the bill has gained six more co-sponsors in the past two days, bringing the total to 112.

• European Parliament Agrees to Send Airline Passenger Data to US

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.