05.22.13
Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 3:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Money talks and everybody listens
Summary: New examples of power being acquired and investments (i.e. for profit) being funnelled into the beneficiaries
The stocks/finance-oriented Web sites love to talk about the Gates Foundation not because of charity but because of investment. The ‘charity’ is often a convenient disguise for lobbying for one’s own investments and vested interests. Last month Gates invested in a company that uses patents, painting it also as a grant and investment (i.e. for-profit stake). “Meanwhile,” says one report, “Anacor Pharmaceuticals ANAC shares jumped more than 8% to $6.51 in recent action after the company announced it was receiving a $17.7 milllion grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study two filarial worm diseases as well as tuberculosis. The foundation also will invest $5 million in Anacor common shares.”
“The goal here is to derive profit from influence and turn money into influence.”Gates is lobbying and buying influence by putting a stake there. Afterwards he gets given platforms for political and scientific lobbying. “Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will deliver a keynote,” says this story about vaccination. Gates is a vaccination expert? I didn’t know. Did he graduate from college at all? No, but he is rich, so that must mean he is smartest on matters of vaccination. He is also lobbying in colleges by making keynote talks there and receiving PR from the media over minor talking points [1, 2]. It’s inexcusable whitewash of a notoriously ruthless, corrupt businessman. These puff pieces characterise him as a gentleman (contradicting what his own employees said).
Going back to the investment in Anacor (covered in financial press for the most part, less so in medical press), it is an example of power grab, just like the education ‘reform’ initiatives backed by Gates, Murdoch, and Zuckerberg. Here is Murdoch’s press pushing the agenda, piggybacking Facebook and characterising it as some kind of charity when all it’s geared up towards is privatisation of education.
“In “‘creation myth’ of capitalist patriarchy”, rich & powerful men like Bill Gates own life through patents & IP.”
–Jose R RodriguezIncidentally, last month we saw this other lobbying/entryism, accompanying a campaign of bribing more schools to align Gates’ way and take orders. Here is one of the latest examples, peppered and server using some PR with a personal story attached to it in corporate media like Murdoch’s Fox ‘news’ (among other corporate channels [1, 2, 3]).
The goal here is to derive profit from influence and turn money into influence. Recently, Vandana Shiva said that “[o]ne rich man named Bill Gates is financing one Australian scientist James Dale who knows one crop, the banana, to impose inefficient and hazardous GM bananas on millions of people in India and Uganda.” This is GMO promotion from Gates — an issue we wrote about many times before. “In “‘creation myth’ of capitalist patriarchy”,” quotes this activist, “rich & powerful men like Bill Gates own life through patents & IP.” █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Finance, Microsoft at 2:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Bill Gates’ staff is entering positions of financial power, indirectly giving Gates power over US (national and international) finance
Why would Bill Gates run for president when he can get his cronies put in positions of power and actually lobby presidents all around the world without having to be elected and re-elected? It is a life-long career for him and he has more political power than every president in isolation because presidents can rarely keep their position for longer than several years.
“Bill Gates may soon become US budget chief by proxy (his crony in charge).”The Gates Foundation, like an octopus with tentacles, has already put many members of staff in positions of power, e.g. in education, agriculture, and energy. Why would anyone entrust a looting giant for education of children or put his goons in charge of the national budget? Maybe because the system has already been rotten from the inside. Remember that Gates’ budget know-how is based mostly on dirty tricks; both he and Microsoft are not paying tax owing to political entryism. If one lets this sociopath send his goons around to control panels on various walks of life, the no wonder policy becomes people-hostile and corporations-leaning. The government is lobbied by corporations and Gates together (yes, side by side) and it shows. The government has its separation from commerce blurred, so it is akin to fascism.
In what’s not exactly news anymore, Bill Gates may soon become US budget chief by proxy (his crony in charge). To quote: “A former leader at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is close to confirmation as the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
“President Obama nominated Silvia Mathews Burwell to the position in March. On Wednesday she met with the Senate Budget Committee in Washington D.C. ”
“Microsoft itself seems to be another Enron waiting to implode”Also noteworthy is this: “The $4.2 billion-asset company said Thursday that Connie Collingsworth, general counsel of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been elected a director. Collingsworth, who once was a partner at Preston Gates & Ellis, manages the Seattle foundation’s legal needs and serves on its management committee.”
See more here. Banks get leadership from Gates.
Meanwhile, quite revealingly, Gates continues dumping Microsoft shares. Yes, “Bill Gates sold 12,605,492 shares of Microsoft ( MSFT ) for $390,360,320″ despite gaining 7 billion dollars in wealth last year. He just doesn’t bank on Microsoft growth. That’s why he left, to expand in other areas. Microsoft itself seems to be another Enron waiting to implode. Maybe it will need public subsidies (a bailout) that the US Budget Chief can facilitate. █
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Posted in IBM, Patents at 2:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Big Blue versus small trolls
Summary: How David Kappos and IBM (his longtime employer) continue to ignore the obvious problem which kills small businesses and everyone is complaining about
There is a recent study showing that quality of patents declined considerably, helping to prove why the USPTO gets the fire it’s under and very much deserves it. Greed took over and David Kappos recently denied yet again that there was a problem, based on some tweets. Kappos is from a patent giant, IBM, so he can be excused for being ignorant of the facts. Current IBM executives similarly groom the USPTO, as we demonstrated several times earlier this month.
Here is a recent report about patents killing an innovative startup and here is another. Earlier this week we saw this filing from the SIIA on what patents do to the industry. To quote some commentary about it: “You may enjoy going through them, but I thought you might like to see one of the more thoughtful of the public comments, the one from Ken Wasch [PDF], President of the Software & Information Industry Association, or SIIA, a trade association for the software industry with 700 plus members, because it provides details on how the patent trolls attack and what the results have been. I don’t see members listed on the site, but the Software Board lists a number of companies, including Red Hat and IBM, and a number of smaller companies. And the comment states that trolls are hindering innovation, being “masters at abusing and manipulating the patent system.” The footnotes alone are worth noting, but the really interesting part is how the comment explains how trolls do what they do. I learned something I’ve long wondered about, why trolls hide who they are in litigation.”
“IBM is not merely not part of the solution; IBM is part of the problem.”The problem is not just trolls (small patent aggressors) but software patents or scope of patents. Don’t expect an IBM-backed front group to say so though, they would rather alter the debate, replacing grassroots with corporate lobby which calls for elimination of only small aggressors.
When will IBM finally take a brave stance on patents and stop promoting software patents around the whole world, even in countries other than its home country? IBM is not merely not part of the solution; IBM is part of the problem. OIN has done nothing against trolls. SIIA itself, like the BSA which IBM had supported until not so long ago, is anti-FOSS [1, 2, 3], █
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05.21.13
Posted in Deception, Patents at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”
–Bill Gates, hypocrite
Summary: Eamonn Fingleton is rewriting history in the US’ top newspaper, insinuating that patents contributed to the rise of software duopolists
TECHDIRT SAYS THAT an “Author Claims That If Apple And Microsoft Started Today They’d Fail Without Stronger Patent Protection”. What utter nonsense. The very opposite is true. So who is the revisionist? Masnick’s site says “The NY Times has a slightly odd op-ed piece, written by Eamonn Fingleton, author of a book about how China is going to dominate the US economically.”
If China is going to dominate, then it’s because it’s a producing nation. Patents don’t matter much in this context. So-called ‘knowledge workers’ cannot dominate over labour forever, as the labour can relocate to domestic employers who reap all the benefits rather than foreigners doing so. Apple failed to convince the Koreans that it invented digital rubberbanding. Yes, Korean giant Samsung was actually defended by the biased US patent system, the USPTO. As this article helps show, Samsung is quickly becoming a front runner for Android, so this matters a lot. All that Apple can lean on now is patent regime of the US and some embargo instruments like the ITC, which is a subject we will address in a separate post another day. █
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Posted in Patents, Red Hat at 11:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Indecision claimed thus far
Summary: Analyses suggest that an escalation by appeal to SCOTUS is likely to be the next stage in ‘Bilski 2.0′
THE decision from CAFC about a software patent has helped generate a lot of contradictory coverage, where patent lawyers insist there is no change, whereas others claim many software patents — if not all — have just died [1, 2]. Bilski was a tad similar to that. Now comes the take of Red Hat’s Rob Tiller, a lawyer who seems not to be strongly against software patents, just softly. He wrote the following about the CAFC ruling: “The law of software patents took an interesting, and ultimately encouraging, turn a little more than a week ago. In the CLS Bank case, ten judges of the Federal Circuit issued five separate opinions, without any single legal theory gaining a majority. Their debate showed that the scope of the subject matter requirement for patenting software is far from settled. It also makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will speak to the issue, and get it right.”
“Their debate showed that the scope of the subject matter requirement for patenting software is far from settled. It also makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will speak to the issue, and get it right.”
–Rob TillerHere is the take of another site sceptical of software patents. It asks: “What inventions are eligible for patent protection?”
It then says “the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals (often called the nation’s patent court) was supposedly riding to the rescue. The court’s eagerly-awaited en banc decision in CLS Bank Int’l v. Alice Corp. [pdf] was widely expected to clarify the patentability of computer-related inventions, which play a vital role in the US economy. Unfortunately, instead of clarifying the law, the court’s 10 May ruling increased the confusion, casting doubt on more than 300,000 patents – including one-fifth of all patents issued last year.”
It is worth noting that one fifth of new patents in the USPTO are software patents now. Fox Rothschild LLP agreed with Tiller on the eventuality: “It’s also likely that the decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court.” SCOTUS rules in favour of corporate power (its Justices are appointed by politicians who are funded by corporations), but maybe it will surprise us this time around. █
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Posted in Asia, Microsoft at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Renting Microsoft software rather than using Free (as in freedom, or libre) software?
Summary: Equipped with PR about toilets, Gates’ lobbying arm is stepping into a GNU/Linux and Free/libre software vanguard, namely Kerala
It is no longer controversial to say that many foundations set up by rich people have an agenda other than or beyond what they publicly say. Many journalists take that as a given because they have come across stories that convince them of that. The Gates Foundation has been arranging panels around the world and scheduled lobbying journeys for Gates to guard his ever-growing wealth and investments. Last month Dubai was the destination and Gates was scheduled to meet public officials there for lobbying and some investments (he is lobbying leaders as though he is a technology expert because he is wealthy, which evidently is his main skills, monopolising and then profiteering).
“They are lobbying governments to give taxpayers’ money to companies they invest in, essentially a subsidy for billionaires to profit from, as usual”One notable outcome of the meetings in the middle east is a pact of foundations of the super-rich, including another Gates pact with Alwaleed Bin Talal. See [1, 2, 3] for background about those two. They are lobbying governments to give taxpayers’ money to companies they invest in, essentially a subsidy for billionaires to profit from, as usual. That is the business model. As one report in the Indian press put it: “Other participants at the summit also announced their contributions — USD 457 million from Britain, USD 250 million from Canada, and USD 240 million from Norway.”
The headlines all parrot the same taking point about “eradicating polio”, but Gates should not be given credit (he tries to hoard and opportunistically monopolise credit). People in this area of research know he wasn’t the one to eradicate polio, which is almost eradicated anyway. He wants to grab credit for it and funnel further investment/taxpayers’ money to companies he is investing in, for personal gain, e.g. through patent monopolies. Watch the press release health-washing it for reputation laundering benefiting Gates and his plutocrat friend.
With all that said, let us recall the EDGI tactics of Microsoft, and in particular Gates’ role in it. When India was going towards software freedom something disruptive happened. Gates was announcing AIDS-related activities, essentially a lot of hype, to help Microsoft derail GNU/Linux-friendly policy in India. They are buying politicians this way and the hype usually turns out to be in vain some time down the line (a journalist recently gave me an example of this from Microsoft and Gates in Egypt).
Something similar might be happening in Kerala right now. The political camps there can be played off against one another based on new Wikileaks material and Gates seem to be appealing to politicians in Kerala, a famous adopter of GNU/Linux.
” We gave a lot of examples where Gates pushes for Microsoft in libraries in prior years.”The Gates Foundation has announced some health-related stuff and got a lot of fake press (PR) for it, e.g. [1, 2] (publicity and lobbying go hand in hand) , so watch out for politicians who call for Microsoft in schools and government (public sector) again. We saw this before.
Having just lobbied the middle east’s richest nations, Gates managed to impose Microsoft software on many libraries in the region. From last month’s news: “Reach Out To Asia (Rota) and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced a three-year collaboration deal to increase public access to libraries in Asia and the Middle East.”
So basically that’s more Microsoft in the public sector, courtesy of Gates. We gave a lot of examples where Gates pushes for Microsoft in libraries in prior years [1, 2, 3]. Don’t let him do the same in Kerala with his toilets-themed (“sanitation”) PR. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Organizations around the globe are increasingly developing new applications for big data, mobile and cloud, not to mention the increasing creation and use of social tools, within major markets like banking, communications, retail, transportation and finance. These new applications are also fundamental to operating in a connected world where sensors, data centers, smartphones and even cars are now all connected in a large ecosystem.
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The sudden increase by 2%, ~480K users, can only be a whole province’s schools or the Government of Canada. Nothing else is large enough for the sudden change. Even Dell could not do that pushing GNU/Linux at the retail level. The Government of Canada has been considering use of GNU/Linux for more than a decade but certainly not globally. They even considered dual-booting rather than one OS or the other per user. In 2011, Transport Canada documented how severely they were locked in to that other OS. There’s no way they suddenly switched. Recently the government rewarded a teacher who developed a GNU/Linux laboratory. They may have read about GNU/Linux and studied it but they don’t seem to have any motivation to switch despite having an estimate of break-even of 18months for migration.
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One of my favorite things to do when I am teaching is explaining the whole Linux thing to my undergrad students. It takes a while to understand that no, their instructor isn’t crazy (about this), there really is a free operating system out there that’s pretty much running the Internet, supercomputers, and the DVR back in their dorm room.
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Desktop
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Thanks in part to mixed reactions to Windows 8, a growing number of disenfranchised Windows users are giving Ubuntu a second look. In this article, I’ll be offering my own comparison between Ubuntu and Windows, explaining where each has its strengths and which OS offers something better overall.
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Kernel Space
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“Compared to the Linux kernel, the kernel of that other OS is as inspiring as wet noodles,” blogger Robert Pogson said. “No one can trust it to work for them. After decades of BSODs, vulnerabilities by the score and sluggish behavior on fast hardware, many suspect that there is evil in the black hole.”
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.9.3, 3.4.46, and 3.0.79 stable kernels. As always, they contain important fixes throughout the tree, so users should upgrade.
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Graphics Stack
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Linux graphics drivers have come a long way in recent years for both the open and closed-source solutions from AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel. In this Sunday article, a Phoronix reader has shared his experiences in going from failing to setup two monitors under Linux just a few years ago with NVIDIA to now successfully driving six monitors on a single system using the AMD Linux driver.
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One month after Rob Clark began developing his Freedreno Gallium3D stack for Qualcomm’s Adreno A3xx hardware, he’s beginning to achieve visual success. While the code hasn’t yet been merged into mainline Mesa, on an A320 as found on the Google Nexus 4 he has es2gears (the OpenGL ES version of glxgears) successfully running on this open-source code.
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Applications
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A visit to a planetarium might be fascinating, but doesn’t occur very often. The Stellarium software, however, provides a really interesting and convenient alternative. Moreover, Stellarium helps in observing the actual night sky. Because the software presents the sky photorealistically, nothing stands in the way of making it available in a classroom or during a lecture. And, because Stellarium is available in the repositories for all the major distributions, installation is at the click of a button.
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Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There’s the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more.
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Instructionals/Technical
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NextStep4it has a nice little tutorial on setting up a local CentOS yum mirror using reposync. Maintaining a local mirror has several benefits, and is a recommended practice for maintaining even modest number of servers. Pointing all your updates at a local mirror speeds up patching, reduces bandwidth consumption, and standardizes patch sets across periods of time.
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Games
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Linux has an ever-expanding library of thousands of free games, many of which are released under an open source license. A good selection of these titles are entertaining, highly addictive, offer captivating gameplay, and are most importantly, great fun to play. Identifying entertaining and challenging games is something that we have a passion for.
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Linux has an ever-expanding library of thousands of free games, many of which are released under an open source license. A good selection of these titles are entertaining, highly addictive, offer captivating gameplay, and are most importantly, great fun to play. Identifying entertaining and challenging games is something that we have a passion for.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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These days, it’s rather hard to point someone interested in Simon to a website as most of the information is strewn across different sites of the KDE infrastructure. Especially for people outside of KDE, it’s very hard to find e.g. the forum or the bug tracker.
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Antergos Linux is a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. The distribution started under the Cinnarch moniker with the objective of providing a Cinnamon-only desktop distribution using the same rolling release development model as its parent distribution.
It got its new name after the developers came to the conclusion that it was going to be extremely difficult to reconcile the Cinnamon and Arch Linux development models, opting instead to use GNOME 3 as the default desktop environment and provide support for other desktop environments.
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There’s still a perception that Linux is difficult to use and is only for Geeks. This seems rather silly, since most casual users, the folks who use their computers only for surfing, email and word processing, would have little to no learning curve at all using many Linux distros these days. In fact, even with some of the more “advanced” distros, your grandma wouldn’t have any trouble sitting right down and doing whatever it is she does when she’s on the computer.
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Hybryde Fusion is a new desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop. Unlike most other Ubuntu-based distributions, it brings a few interesting features to the table.
Hybryde Fusion 13.04 is the distribution’s first release and the developer, Larrieu Olivier, is based in France. I’m still playing with a test installation, so this is not a review, but a presentation of a bunch of screen shots just to show what this distribution has to offer.
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Although Megatotoro migrated to Linux a bit later than I did, he took his migration seriously and learned a lot of Linux tricks before I did, all thanks to Mepis, Pardus, and AntiX, his distros of choice.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The early articles of this site revolved around the late and somewhat lamented Mandriva, which faced troubles as a Linux distribution, product, and company. Although Distrowatch lists Mageia within its top 10 of most clicked distributions, Mageia receives the same coverage in the media as long running PCLinuxOS and Sabayon. In fact, popular frugal Linux distribution Puppy Linux is mentioned more in articles and forums than Mageia.
Why run Mageia 2 when the developers will be releasing Mageia 3 ( an RC is already out) soon? Well, to see if an updated previous release is a stable one – typically a good sign that a distribution has matured and the next release deserves a go. The positive reception for openSUSE 12.3, for example, was already foreshadowed by the excellent openSUSE 12.2 (which I’m still running to this day).
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At long last the third major version of Mageia, the popular community fork of Mandriva Linux, is now available. There’s a lot of new stuff to Mageia 3 like a new version of RPM and updated systemd, but the distribution is still not shipping GRUB2 by default.
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Mageia 3 was released today and I downloaded the Live DVD version to replace my Mageia 2 Desktop install without further consideration. Normally, I test the betas and the RC of a distro carefully in a virtual machine. This time, sadly, I had no time to do that.
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Almost two months later than initially expected, the Mageia developers have released the third major version of their Linux distribution. Mageia was originally forked from Mandriva over two and a half years ago and is now “all grown up and ready to go dancing,” according to its developers. Mageia 3 updates the distribution’s kernel, systemd startup tools, the six available desktop environments and a large number of included applications. The release is dedicated to long-time Mandriva contributor and Intel employee Eugeni Dodonov who died last year in a road accident.
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Red Hat Family
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In a report published Monday, BMO Capital Markets analyst Karl Keirstead downgraded the rating on Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) from Outperform to Market Perform, but reiterated the $54.00 price target.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ever since 2005, Ubuntu has delivered Mozilla’s Firefox browser as its default browser, which has made millions of Ubuntu users loyal users of Firefox. But Firefox is hardly the only browser choice that Ubuntu users have. If you’ve tried Chromium–the open source core of Google’s Chrome browser–you already know that it’s fast, clean and very stable. That has now produced a lively discussion going on online about whether Ubuntu 13.10, due later this year, should ship with Chromium as the default browser.
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Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I’ve reviewed laptops I’ve never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and surprisingly powerful.
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It’s been a while since last running any Ubuntu Linux disk encryption benchmarks, but thanks to recent encryption improvements within the upstream Linux ecosystem, it’s time to deliver some new Linux disk encryption benchmarks. In this article are results comparing Ubuntu 13.04 without any form of disk encryption to using the home directory encryption feature (eCryptfs-based) and full-disk encryption (using LUKS with an encrypted LVM).
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Devon IT unveiled an HDMI stick that can turn any HDMI-compatible monitor or display into an interactive virtual desktop. “Ceptor” is somewhat larger than a typical USB memory stick, runs Devon IT’s Linux-based ZeTOS “zero client” operating system on a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SOC (system-on-chip), and sells for $99.
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Phones
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Jolla has just unveiled its first smartphone, which will go on sale this year for €399 (roughly $510). Running the company’s MeeGo-derived Sailfish OS, it features a 4.5-inch display, a dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera, LTE (in selected markets), removable back covers, 16GB of onboard storage, and a microSD slot. According to Jolla, the handset will be “compliant” with Android apps, although it’s not sure how many apps will be supported, nor is it clear where users will download the apps from.
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Ballnux
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Following the success of Galaxy Grand, Samsung launched the Galaxy Grand Quattro in India today. Priced competitively at Rs.17,290, the grand Quattro targets the lower mid range segment.
The Galaxy Grand Quattro features a 4.7 inch at 480×800 resolution. The Dual-SIM phone is powered by 1.2GHz quad core Cortex A5 processor, Adreno 203 GPU, 1GB RAM and is running Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2. It comes with a 5 megapixel shooter and 0.3 megapixel from facing camera. The internal memory is limited to 8GB, but has an expandable memory up to 32GB.
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If you’ve been following recent market share numbers for smartphones and mobile operating systems, then you know that Samsung has achieved a dominant position with its Android phones, and especially the Galaxy line of phones. Now, Samsung has launched its “Samsung Smart App Challenge 2013,” inviting developers who work with the company’s peer-to-peer software to develop competitive apps for the S4 phone. The contest includes $800,000 in prize money.
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Android
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Perhaps no group has earned a borderline obscene pejorative as quickly as the wearers of Google Glass. I mean, the product, not due for release until early next year, is seen in the wild today only on the few thousand who are its early testers. And yet we already
have the term “glasshole.” Google Glass has also been banned ahead of its release. This all seems to stem from the belief, voiced by writers such as Jason Perlow, that Google Glass is evil, since “it’s a ‘stealth’ recording device.”
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Intel has released a new set of development tools for the Android Jelly Bean mobile device operating system called Beacon Mountain.
Beacon Mountain version 0.5 is only compatible with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean
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We know that “wherefore art thou?” was about Romeo, but if your question was for (Dell’s) Ophelia, then it’s likely more “when art thou.” The answer? July. The Android pendrive / USB computer we saw back at CES may be one of many, but distinctive thanks to its mainstream PC-maker origins. We’re still lacking a lot of the specifics, other than that there’s WiFi, Bluetooth, Wyse PocketCloud integration, plus, of course, HDMI and Android 4.something.
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Dell’s latest move to insinuate itself into the Android market, Project Ophelia, will be hitting our shelves soon.
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Indroid Inside Intel has released “Beacon Mountain” a development environment for Android apps on both its own Atom silicon and ARM chippery.
Beacon Mountain emerged over the weekend, promising “productivity-oriented design, coding, and debugging tools for apps targeting … smartphones and tablets.”
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Last year Google introduced a media player called the Nexus Q which was designed to let you stream content from your phone or tablet (and from the internet) to your TV. It didn’t last long.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Will Ubuntu PC makers ZaReason and System76 introduce Linux tablets? Here are clues about the future of ZaTab and System76′s own Ubuntu tablet ambitions.
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Twitter is increasingly using open source automation tools to ensure security processes are taken care of in all the code it produces.
“Automation is where we see application security teams going in future,” Alex Smolen, Twitter product security team software engineer, told the Security Development Conference 2013 in San Francisco.
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In 1991, a Finnish university student posted a project on an internet discussion board that would change the world. Linus Torvalds had put up the first version of Linux, a computer operating system that within thirty-five years, millions of volunteer programmers around the world would have developed to a point where versions of Linux power 75% of mobile phones sold around the world in the first quarter of 2013 and the majority of websites on the internet, including the one you’re reading this article on right now.
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How can I get paid for free software development? That’s a question many developers ask. And it’s a good question, because software development is expensive, no matter what the license is. Money is one way to pay for this, but fortunately there are many other ways to get paid for free software. The one thing you should never do, though, is to sell free software cheap.
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Google is currently deploying an update for its Talk chat client that will replace it with the new Hangouts app. Introduced last week at the I/O developer conference in San Francisco, the Hangouts application is designed to put an end to having three simultaneously available real-time Google communication services – Talk, Google+ Messenger and the original Google+ Hangouts – and is available for Android, iOS, Windows, and as a Chrome extension.
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Mobile use cases are the major focus for the next version of the open source web frontend framework Bootstrap. Under the heading of “Bootstrap 3 will be mobile-first”, the developers have merged the responsive CSS templates into the core bootstrap.css file, dropping support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6 in the process. The changes are aimed at making site designs implemented in Bootstrap adaptable to mobile resolutions by default, without the user having to explicitly enable additional functionality. Bootstrap, which originated at Twitter, has become popular with many developers and is used by hundreds of sites.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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For years, Ubuntu and Firefox have strolled the open source countryside hand-in-hand. That could change with the release of Ubuntu 13.10, however, as Canonical is thinking about dumping Firefox for Chromium.
It’s hard to believe that Firefox’s run as the default browser on Ubuntu could be coming to an end. In 2005, it was Firefox 1.0.2 that shipped with Hoary Hedgehog. Eight years later, you’ll find Firefox 20 in Ubuntu 13.04. When 13.10 arrives in the second half of this year, you may have to install the package manually from the Ubuntu Software Center if you want to keep surfing with the ‘fox.
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CMS
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BSD
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The NetBSD Foundation has announced the first feature update of NetBSD 6 in the form of NetBSD 6.1. The changes in 6.1 include fixes in the kernel for processes with attributes. Networking gets fixes for “atomic fragments” in IPv6, fixes for locking issues in the ipf packet filter, many changes to the npf packet filter library and a correction to the VirtIO NIC driver which had been crashing recent QEMU versions. Filesystem changes include various fixes and working big-endian support for smbfs and an ability to mount ext2fs and msdosfs in 32-bit compat mode.
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Project Releases
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The developers of HandBrake, the popular open source video transcoder, have announced the release of version 0.9.9 of the popular video conversion application. Another two beta releases of HandBrake, one which previews the transcoder working with Intel’s Quick Sync Video SDK and another which uses OpenCL to accelerate cropping and scaling and decoding on windows, were also released.
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Just three months after the exciting QEMU 1.4 release, QEMU 1.5 is now available with many exciting and new features for those using this open-source software in a virtualized world. There’s the VFIO VGA pass-through support, USB 3.0 improvements, and much more.
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Public Services/Government
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A rising number of municipalities in Portugal are turning to open source software solutions for their Geo Information Systems, says Pedro Venâncio, a GIS engineer working for the municipality of Pinhel. “When it comes to GIS, in our municipality we only use open source”, he says
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Openness/Sharing
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Range Networks, which makes open-source cellular systems, announced that its equipment now integrates with operators’ SS7-MAP core networks and supports 4G. The company, which targets rural and developing markets and private industrial networks with low-cost network equipment, has been collaborating with SS7Ware and said that its One Core Network now supports 2G, 3G and 4G network nodes to be run off of the same core network. Previously, the company’s equipment was limited to 2G, 2.5G, and 3G GSM systems.
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Programming
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The latest release of Perl, Perl 5.18, is now available as a stable release. Among the many changes that have taken place over the twelve months of development and 400,000 changed lines of code, is a major overhaul of how hashing is implemented.
The new hash implementation uses a random seed which will vary the return values from keys(), values() and each() each time a program is run; this change makes Perl’s hashes more robust and exposes hash-order dependency bugs. This improvement in security is accompanied by a fix for code injection through translations (CVE-2012-6329) and stopping Perl calling memset with a negative value (CVE-2012-5195), a problem which could become a heap overrun.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Twenty children were among at least 91 people killed when a powerful tornado swept through an Oklahoma City suburb, tearing down blocks of homes and two schools, local officials said.
The state medical examiner’s office released the latest death toll but the number was climbing rapidly, as emergency crews combed through smashed homes and the collapsed remains of an elementary school in Moore, Oklahoma.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“Citizen Koch,” a documentary about money in politics focused on the Wisconsin uprising, was shunned by PBS for fear of offending billionaire industrialist David Koch, who has given $23 million to public television, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The dispute highlights the increasing role of private money in “public” television and raises even further concerns about the Kochs potentially purchasing eight major daily newspapers.
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Censorship
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Civil Rights
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Weev, whose real name is Andrew Auernheimer, was taken to court and subsequently landed in jail following his infamous and controversial AT&T hack. He’s in prison for 41 months, but even holed up behind bars Weev is causing trouble of the non-violent kind. The Daily Dot reports that Weev is believed to be locked up in solitary confinement following an unsanctioned tweet that shouldn’t have been published in the first place.
Auernheimer’s lawyer Tor Ekeland says the tweeting from his client’s @rabite handle is the cause of the sudden isolation – Auernheimer is even unable to speak with his lawyer. While Auernheimer isn’t allowed access to the Internet directly, there’s something called the Trust Fund Limited Computer System (TRULINCS), a system where inmates can send email messages to approved contacts. Basically, he would use this system to send messages to a secure contact who would then tweet for him – think of it like surrogate tweeting.
What looked like his own tweets were actually messages Auernheimer was sending to an approved content to tweet for him … at least that’s what is being assumed. With the help of a friend or friends, Auernheimer has been able to tweet relatively frequently. You can see his stream embedded below.
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05.20.13
Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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As rich as the Linux OS is, one of its sticking-points is that a lot of companies don’t properly support their products for it. Your Logitech mouse might work just fine under the OS, of course, but it wouldn’t be the company to thank; rather, the support comes from the efforts of developers who share the same passion for the OS as you do. My ASUS Xonar audio card works brilliantly under Linux, but ASUS had nothing to do with it.
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Applications
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New Releases
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Version 1.10.90 (alpha) of GDBM is available for download at ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gdbm/gdbm-1.10.90.tar.gz
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Strangely it has been a rather quiet month as far as new developments in the GNU toolchain goes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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he third official release of, the popular Mandriva fork, Mageia is now available. After months of delays and a mountain of challenges, Patricia Fraser said, “We still can’t believe how much fun it is to make Mageia together, and we’ve been doing it for two and a half years.”
Like every new release, Mageia 3 comes chocked full ‘o upgrades. Some of these include Linux 3.8.13, Xorg X Server 1.13.4, GCC 4.7.2, KDE 4.10.2, GNOME 3.6, LibreOffice 4.0.2, GIMP 2.8.2, and Firefox 17.05. But a few new surprises await as well.
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Debian Family
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Debian GNU/Linux is one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions and will be celebrating its 20th anniversary later this year. The venerable project is home to hundreds of volunteers who maintain over 35,000 software packages. Debian has expanded over the years and currently supports nine hardware architectures, displaying an unusual level of flexibility for a Linux distribution. Debian isn’t just a long lived Linux distro, the project also maintains ports which allow developers and users to experiment with running GNU software on top of alternative kernels, including Hurd and the FreeBSD kernel. This amazing diversity, along with Debian’s reputation for stability, has caused many developers to base their own projects on Debian.
Dozens of the world’s most popular and widely used open-source projects (including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and KNOPPIX) can trace their ancestry back to Debian. Apart from being one of the largest existing open-source projects Debian is also a social experiment. The project is run as a democracy, a rarity in the open-source world, where developers vote on important changes and are guided by a constitution. For the reasons given above, more so than the anticipated features, the release of a new version of Debian sends ripples through the open-source community. Debian may be a famously conservative project, but everything its developers do affect large portions of the open-source population. I was quite eager to see what Debian 7.0, code name Wheezy, would offer.
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Debian Edu / Skolelinux is an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server, network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of educational software. The project was founded almost 12 years ago, 2001-07-02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity, please donate some money.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Among the topics discussed by the developers at Ubuntu Developer Summit 13.05 were the planned new features for Ubuntu 13.10. The next version of the distribution, code-named “Saucy Salamander”, could include early versions of Ubuntu’s Mir display server and have the Qt-based Unity Next desktop environment for testing. However, the default configuration will continue to include the graphics stack of Ubuntu 12.10 with X11, Compiz and Unity 7. By 2014, Canonical plans to unify the code base for Ubuntu’s smartphone, tablet and PC desktops, based on Mir and Unity Next.
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I don’t think many people have realised that we are on the verge of a technological revolution. The computing world is changing, and this is the first time GNU/Linux is catching the revolution as it begins. Computers are getting smaller and smaller, while phones are getting bigger and bigger. Everybody can see that they about to converge — but in what form? Well, the answer is: GNU/Linux — before anybody else. The ingredients? A great GNU/Linux distribution, a leader with the right vision, and a few very bold, ground-breaking choices. Mix it well: the result is Ubuntu Touch. Let me go through these ingredients.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Linux Mint developers have announced a release candidate for the upcoming version of their distribution, Linux Mint 15. The release, which is code-named “Olivia”, is being built on Ubuntu 13.04 and is billed by Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre as “the most ambitious release since the start of the project.”
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Welcome, Willkommen, Bienvenue! To the second article in my Pandora series. As you recall, several weeks back, I received a test unit from Michael Mrozek, of the world’s smallest, most-powerful gaming micro-computer. In the first installment, we talked most about initial impressions, the look & feel, specifications, and a brief taste of the variety of its capabilities, technologies and interfaces.
Now, we will dig deeper. In this article, I will focus on firmware refresh of the test unit, trying to bring the system to a newer edition, as well as dabble in the ins and outs of the Xfce desktop environment. I will leave the gaming-oriented MiniMenu and the Android mod for the third and last part in this would-be trilogy. Follow me.
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THE SINGLE BOARD MICROCONTROLLER Arduino has been revamped to offer WiFi connectivity under Linux, in order to make connecting to complex web services much easier directly from the device.
Named the Arduino Yún, which apparently is Chinese for “cloud”, the microcontroller claims to be the first of a family of WiFi products combined with a customised version of the Linux operating system (OS) distribution OpenWRT called Linino.
Designed in collaboration with chip firm Dog Hunter, Linino provides signed packages to ensure the authenticity of the software installed on the device and, according to Arduino, Linino is the most used Linux distribution for embedded devices.
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Phones
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Finnish startup Jolla has announced its first smartphone, which shows off its Sailfish OS on a 4.5-inch screen.
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Ballnux
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Holy shit! What you, Dedoimedo, you sellout, you hypocrite! Wait, calm down. All is well. There’s a reason why I decided to buy a tablet. One, I can afford it. Two, I really wanted to see what makes the retards get so excited. Three, I had an actual business need for this, but more about that later. Anyhow, this is my very first experience with a tablet. Honestly. I’ve never used one before. So it should be definitely most interesting. I’ve dabbled in Android a bit now and then, and overall, I was not really impressed. The x86 version for netbooks was ok but not magnificent, however, on the other hand, my smartphone experience was, overall, quite frustrating.
Let’s how a pretentious old git like me managed to cope with this new modern technology. Better yet, why a pretentious old git like me would ever want to buy a device that is operated by touch only. Finally, this is a proper, thorough review of the Samsung tablet, probably of a higher quality, relevance and greater depth than anything else out there, because after all, it’s Dedoimedo writing this stellar review. Avanti.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Sony recently added their flagship Android smartphone, the Sony Xperia Z to the Android Open Source Project, and the latest device to be added to ASOP is the Sony Xperia Tablet Z.
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Open Enterprise mostly writes about “obvious” applications of open source – situations where money can be saved, or control regained, by shifting from proprietary to open code. That battle is more or less won: free software is widely recognised as inherently superior in practically all situations, as its rapid uptake across many markets demonstrates. But there are also some circumstances where it may not be so obvious that open source is the solution, because it’s not always clear what the problem is.
For example, in the field of economics, there is a well-known paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff entitled, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” The main result is that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” Needless to say, this has been seized upon and widely cited by those in favour of austerity.
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The humble browser. Its main purpose, for many years, was to serve up simple HTML documents and provide information on just about any subject you could think of. In the last decade, with broadband taking over from dial-up, and net connections getting ever quicker, websites have increasingly provided applications usually restricted to the desktop.
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CMS
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The big news in the tech world that emerged over the weekend is that Yahoo is set to repeat its decade old mistake and acquire Tumblr (Geocities redux) for $1 Billion.
I’m not a fan of Tumblr, but I am a fan of freedom and WordPress, both of which are apparently now ‘winning’ as a side effect of this deal. While it’s still unclear precisely how Yahoo’s ownership may/may not affect Tumblr, users are already voting with their blogs.
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Public Services/Government
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The administration of the Italian city of Bari must increase its use of free and open source software solutions, say local representatives of the Five Star Movement. Switching to open source will be part of the movement’s election programme for the municipal elections in 2014.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Joshua Pearce, PhD, is a researcher at Michigan Tech who rearches open source and low-impact solutions to engineering problems. He is also the founder of the Printers For Peace contest, an effort to bring together clever 3D-printed ideas that have loftier aims. You can win one of two 3D printers if you submit a winning project.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Pakistan’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman, has asked Washington to end drone strikes
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A recent survey suggests that 75% of Pakistanis dislike the USA and it’s mainly because of drones
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Voting figures to have impact on U.S. policy in the region.
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The CIA chief has made an unexpected visit to Israel to meet senior political and military figures to discuss the deteriorating security situation in neighbouring Syria.
John Brennan, who took up his post two months ago, met the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, military chief of staff, Benny Gantz, and Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, according to reports in Israel media.
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RUSSIA has named the alleged CIA station chief in Moscow, following its decision to expel a US diplomat accused of trying to recruit a Russian intelligence officer as a spy.
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CIA director John Brennan made an unannounced visit to Israel to discuss the situation in Syria.
Brennan and Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, in their meeting Friday reportedly compared intelligence assessments on Syria and its two-year civil war. They also talked about Israel’s intent to continue striking shipments of advanced weapons destined for Hezbollah from Iran via Syria.
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Kurosh Ahmadi was hanged for providing information about Iran to CIA officers, Fars said.
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Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, has rejected accusations from Washington that he was supporting a rebel leader and accused war criminal in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by challenging a senior US official to send a drone to kill the wanted man.
In an interview with the Observer Magazine, Kagame said that on a visit to Washington in March he came under pressure from the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, Johnnie Carson, to arrest Bosco Ntaganda, leader of the M23 rebels, who was wanted by the international criminal court (ICC). The US administration was increasing pressure on Kagame following a UN report claiming to have uncovered evidence showing that the Rwandan military provided weapons and other support to Ntaganda, whose forces briefly seized control of the region’s main city, Goma.
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An apparent US drone attack has killed four suspected Al-Qaida militants in southern Yemen and destroyed an explosives-packed truck, tribal sources said on Saturday.
They occurred on Friday night in Al-Mahfad region in Abyan province, the sources said.
The truck was carrying grenades and explosive belts, and the attack destroyed the weapons and killed the vehicle’s four occupants, “members of Al-Qaida,” one of the sources said.
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A former US assassination drone pilot says he quit the force after feeling “numb” about seeing a child and other civilians blown away in his remote bombing of targets in Afghanistan and realizing he has unconsciously developed a desire to kill.
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President to push legal case for targeted drone strikes and outline position on Guantánamo detention camp, reports say
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President Barack Obama will discuss his counterterrorism strategy Thursday, revealing to the American public his plans for unmanned drones and Guantanamo Bay, the White House said Sunday.
During his speech at the National Defense University in Washington, the president will discuss “our broad counter-terrorism policy, including our military, diplomatic, intelligence and legal efforts,” a White House official told AFP.
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France is in talks with the United States and Israel to buy intelligence-gathering drones to build up a modern fleet, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Sunday.
France’s existing hardware is outdated and its military intervention in Mali this year has exposed its shortage of surveillance drones suitable for modern warfare. The United States provided French commanders with intelligence from its drones based in Niger
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Over the last eight years Israel has exported $4.6 billion worth of unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a study by the business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
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JAMAAT-e-Islami Ameer Syed Munawar Hasan has asked Mian Nawaz Sharif to have courage on the basis of his public mandate and adopt a bold stance in accordance with the nation’s aspirations.
He said that Washington’s statement to continue drone attacks was a challenge to the newly elected rulers.
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More than 30 students and staff from a ministerial training college have protested outside a factory which makes engines for unmanned flying bombs. The group from The Queen’s Foundation gathered at the Shenstone UAV Engine Factory on Friday 10th May to warn the military that the use of their drones to terrify and kill people in Pakistan is creating a surge in support for the Taliban.
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Drones are everywhere. They are blasting suspected al-Qaida militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. They are menacing China. They are being shot down in Israel. They are hovering outside of homes in America and spying on their residents. And they are forcing us to rethink some basic legal principles—for good reason, because drones are making the old ones obsolete.
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks founder uses subject access request to access British agency chatter, which allegedly calls extradition ‘a fit-up’
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has revealed internal correspondence from the government’s eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, which included speculation that a Swedish arrest warrant issued after rape allegations first surfaced was a stitch-up.
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has poignantly stated that the very sovereignty of Latin American and Caribbean nations has been compromised by a reliance on US-based telecommunications.
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The cost of policing the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange takes refuge inside has now risen to £3.3million, Scotland Yard has disclosed.
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He is hiding from the British authorities who want to extradite him to Sweden where he is wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations. A policeman on duty outside the embassy said in a joke he was worried Assange would sneak out of the embassy in ostrich suit one day.
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Milestone Supreme Court Decision for WikiLeaks Case in Iceland — Today’s [April 24th] decision marked the most important victory to date against the unlawful and arbitrary economic blockade erected by US companies against WikiLeaks.
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Authorities at GCHQ, the government eavesdropping agency, are facing embarrassing revelations about internal correspondence in which Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is discussed, apparently including speculation that he is being framed by Swedish authorities seeking his extradition on rape allegations.
The records were revealed by Assange himself in a Sunday night interview with Spanish television programme Salvados in which he explained that an official request for information gave him access to instant messages that remained unclassified by GCHQ.
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WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has launched a new party ahead of the federal election in Australia on September 14. From the Ecuadorian embassy in London—where he remains under siege by the British authorities, who are denying his democratic right to accept political asylum in the South American state—Assange is heading a slate of Senate candidates for Victoria, New South Wales, and Western Australia.
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WikiLeaks reveal that Union carbide wanted US to persuade GOI for Cooley Loan funds. “BV Salenius, Managing Director of Union Carbide (India) Limited, has called requesting 10 or 15 minutes with Kenneth Rush. He wants to ask him to persuade the Government of India (meaning Finance Minister Chavan) to permit American concerens to borrow Cooley Loan Funds. Salenius has a ferteliser plant in mind. As you are aware, the Government of India has generally not approved new Cooley Loans over the past year and a half. Cooley Loan Financing is much more attractive to Union carbide that that from the Indian banks. They are nationalised and can require their loans to be turned into equity.”
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After the media caught wind that the Department of Justice had covertly gathered over two months’ worth of emails and phone records from the Associated Press, President Obama issued an apology to the irate reporters in the form of the Free Flow of Information Act.
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Julian Assange had been using that term for a time, but economic censorship is as close to the mark as any. If you want to shut someone up, deprive them of funding, cut off the supply, hope they go quietly into the night, hopefully without breaking too many things on the way. The whistleblowing conduit has, since its document releasing bonanzas of 2010, been blockaded. Opponents of WikiLeaks have been attempting to blackball not merely the outfit but its operations in every conceivable way.
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Tiny Iceland has a history of facing down larger adversaries (in 1976 it ‘won’ the Cod Wars against the UK; in 2011 it sent US agents packing for not obeying protocol). But now it will face renewed scrutiny from two of the world’s most powerful agencies: the FBI and the Rightsholders.
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Finance
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With Bitcoin all the rage and startups popping up left and right, it’s hard to know who’s an expert in the virtual currency and who just has an opinion. Most people would put Jeff Garzik in the former camp.
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There’s no shortage of food, no shortage of wealth to solve social crises. The problem is a system that enriches a few and starves the many. We hear day in day out about the massive poverty and hunger that exists in the world. NGO’s and various non-profits have been around for decades appealing for assistance in feeding the world’s poor. Some experts think it is simply an overpopulation problem and it is the poor that are to blame; if only they’d have fewer children, they advise. It is not too many people that are the problem. It is not the lack of medical knowledge or technical expertise that leads to staggering infant and adult death rates in some parts of the world. It is the lack of social infrastructure and the political will needed to provide it.
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- Broadcaster and former footballer John Fashanu on list
- Trade adviser Alpesh Patel also named on leaked database
- It also includes Goldman Sachs and Coutts, The Queen’s bank
- Data has been leaked in tranches by a whistleblower since 2009
- HMRC keen to clamp down on wealth sheltered in tax havens
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”
The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how state/regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012. Personnel engaged in this activity at fusion centers include employees of municipal, county and federal counter terrorism/homeland security entities. Such entities include local police departments, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (including U.S. DHS components such as the Transportation Security Administration).
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Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a nationwide “counter terrorism” apparatus emerged. Components of this apparatus include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (U.S. DHS), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), ODNI’s “National Counterterrorism Center” (NCTC), and state/regional “fusion centers.”
“Fusion centers,” by and large, are staffed with personnel working in “counter terrorism”/ “homeland security” units of municipal, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement/”public safety”/”counter terrorism” agencies. To a large degree, the “counter terrorism” operations of municipal, county, state and tribal agencies engaged in “fusion centers” are financed through a number of U.S. DHS grant programs.
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Privacy
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Amid growing concern over the use of drones by police and government officials for surveillance, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing to limit the use of unmanned surveillance “eyes in the sky” aircraft.
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When Charlottesville passed a resolution against drones in February of this year, I heard from people all over the country again. Since that time, to my knowledge, one little town in Minnesota called St. Bonifacius has passed something, while dozens and dozens have tried and failed. The problem seems to be that drones can have good uses as well as bad. Of course, that’s grounds for halting the lawless and reckless spread of drones until we can figure out any ways in which their good use can be compatible with our Constitutional rights. But that would make too much sense. When there’s money to be made, technology to be played with, and terrorists to destroy our freedoms if we don’t hurry up and destroy them first, the American way is full steam ahead. But I actually think I might have at least a partial answer this time.
[...]
…drones armed with rubber bullets and tear gas.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has jested that instead of scientific peer review, its rival The Lancet had a system of throwing a pile of papers down the stairs and publishing those that reached the bottom. On another occasion, Smith was challenged to publish an issue of the BMJ exclusively comprising papers that had failed peer review and see if anybody noticed. He replied, “How do you know I haven’t already done it?”
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