02.01.12
Posted in Site News at 1:01 am by Guest Editorial Team
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Science
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Science is a public enterprise. A scientific publisher’s primary responsibility is to serve the research community. Their own interests—financial and reputational—depend upon the trust the public has in science. Obstructing the dissemination of publicly funded science will damage, not enhance, that trust. The RWA brings publishers and publishing into disrepute. Already, several academic publishers have spoken out against this Bill, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Lancet also strongly opposes this Bill.
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Health/Nutrition
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Finance
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Anti-Trust
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Dr Adam Whitworth from the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield analyses Home Office 2002-2009 data for burglary, robbery, violence, vehicle crime and criminal damage across England against a range of factors including inequality, unemployment, residential turnover and educational achievement. The results suggest that inequality is significantly and positively associated with increased levels of all five crime types, with effects being larger for acquisitive crime and robust across various different measures of inequality.
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The SFC have successfully used Busybox to force the source release of many vendor kernels, ensuring that users have the freedoms that the copyright holders granted to them. Everybody wins, with the exception of the violators. … A couple of weeks ago, this page appeared on the elinux.org wiki. It’s written by an engineer at Sony, and it’s calling for contributions to rewriting Busybox. This would be entirely reasonable if it were for technical reasons, but it’s not – it’s explicitly stated that companies are afraid that Busybox copyright holders may force them to comply with the licenses of software they ship.
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Censorship
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… proponents of these additions took a few years’ worth of ideas that will make wireless worse, wrapped them up in a bundle, and glued them to the underside of a bill that – if it does not pass – will raise taxes for millions of Americans. In this case, these conditions would apply to spectrum freed up by the transition to digital TV broadcasting, and would impact some of the most useful spectrum to become available for years. … No Net Neutrality Protections. … No Safeguards Against Further Consolidation. … No Super-Wifi. One of the greatest boons of the transition from analog to digital TV broadcasting was supposed to be the creation of unlicensed “whitespaces” or “super-wifi.” This new spectrum – which is much better at communicating long distances and through walls than current wifi spectrum – would be used cooperatively by everyone and usher in a new era of wireless devices.
If this bill passes, it will give new spectrum to the usual monopolists that would have gone to the public and give them a free hand at censorship.
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The real question now, however, is whether this community recognizes the potential it has. Ours is not a Congress that has made just one mistake—almost passing SOPA/PIPA. Ours is a Congress that makes a string of mistakes. Those mistakes all come from a common source: the ability of lobbyists to leverage their power over campaign funds to achieve legislative results that make no public-good sense. … We need a system that is not so easily captured by crony capitalists. We need a government that is not so easily bought. And if only the giant could be brought to demand this too, in the few moments we have before it falls back to sleep, then this war—this “copyright war,” this war that Jack Valenti used to call his own “terrorist war,” where apparently the “terrorists” are our children—will have been worth every bit of the battle.
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Here’s a report of Occupy Oakland being censored
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Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.
The “authorized” sites, of course, would be chosen by the big publishers. This picking of favorites is exactly what Microsoft accused Google of. In private, big publishers demand that power exclusively.
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Great art like this matters too much to passively let monopolists erase it from our common culture. When you find good videos online, consider making local back-up copies. We never know what’s going to be censored when, and without audience back-ups some great art could be lost forever.
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It became almost religious dogma that any legislation built around the process would have broken the Internet and created cesnorship around the world. … PIPA and SOPA would have, in a nutshell, required that Web sites not link to sites “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property.
It’s amazing how people can advocate censorship and say it’s not censorship at the same time. Then again, he might be angry because he’s only making $45 million dollars this year.
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I don’t like the bully-boy tactics. I don’t like the idea that justice has to be bought. I don’t like the idea that crushing one man can become a government priority because he offends the commercial interests of a specific group of well-connected businessmen. And I most definitely do not like the hypocritical, moralistic stance that these self-serving moneymen and their hired vassels adopt when they are, in fact, just trying to eliminate someone whom they perceive — rightly or wrongly, but so far without proving anything — as profiting from the usage of their property.
As search engine censorship demands prove, it’s not about stopping infringement, it’s about stopping competitors. People should avoid the misleading terms, “privacy” and “intellectual property.”
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Privacy
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The FBI is looking to harvest feeds from Twitter, Facebook, and the like because “social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” according to the RFI. “[It] has emerged to be the first instance of communication about a crisis, trumping traditional first responders that included police, firefighters, EMT, and journalists.”
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With funding from the Office of Naval Research, a team at Aptima, Inc. is developing software that’d do more than just scan Twitter for trending topics. Instead, it’d mine the web, including news stories, social networks and blogs, to extract topics and phrases that are gaining traction online. … They’d pull apart a web conversation (the author of the post, the site where it was published, the comments that ensued) and try to figure out which parts contributed most readily to the spread of a revolutionary message. That’s a different approach to prediction than the Pentagon’s current initiatives, like the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System, … The software’s overarching goal? Help the Pentagon determine how “the flow of ideas or ‘memes’ through electronic media can … infect and influence susceptible populations.”
Ah the dream is alive, “Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them.” See also this.
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The bill would require companies to disclose the use of such tracking software and clarify exactly what information the software collects. Customers would have to consent to any data collected or transmitted, and third parties would have to file applications with the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to ensure the data is being transmitted securely.
This is weak but welcome protection because the US market is not really competitive. It is much better than proposals to mandate spying by ISPs.
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They repeat the TSA mantras, that they are a transportation service not an airport service and that loss of privacy and property are voluntary because you can just stay at home. For some reason, corporate media people can’t just call bullshit.
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01.29.12
Posted in Site News at 12:48 am by Guest Editorial Team
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After six years of hard work Iron Sky will premiere at one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. We couldn’t be happier!
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Hardware
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Google’s study which focused on smartphone and feature phone ownership took a sample set from the United States, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K. The study found that 78 percent of internet users in the U.S. accessed the internet via their phone. 68% of of internet users say they used a desktop or laptop …
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The Lumia handsets, which went on sale in Europe in November, probably sold 1.3 million units globally to operators and retailers by the end of last year, according to the average estimate of 22 analysts compiled by Bloomberg … Nokia’s fourth-quarter results will also include the N9, a Lumia 800 lookalike running Nokia smartphone software called MeeGo, which began shipping in September at prices from 480 euros. The N9 may have sold 1.4 million units last quarter, Pareto Oehman analyst Helena Nordman-Knutson said.
It is probably worse than Bloomberg’s Microsoft friendly estimate and sales to retailers are not sales to people.
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The NYT repeats a lot of excuses but the bottom line is that Apple is free to treat foreigners like animals in factories where conditions are terrible. Their slavery degrades us all.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Killing our enemies abroad is just state-sponsored terror – whatever euphemism western leaders like to use
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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It is a shame that companies were not required to prove their materials safe before they were allowed to sell them. See prior demands by reputable scientists
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They got sick and are still sick.
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The South bears a disproportionate burden of dioxin pollution, with 25 of the 30 worst dioxin polluters located in Southern states. There are six major dioxin-emitting facilities in Alabama, five in Louisiana, four in Texas and three in North Carolina.
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More than three years after a disaster at a Tennessee power plant, the Obama administration still has not issued promised protections from coal ash hazards. Environmental groups plan to sue to spur action.
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the federal government has known for at least three years that the wood piles were contaminated with an unknown level of asbestos, even as Libby residents hauled truckload after truckload of the material away from the site and placed it in yards, in city parks, outside schools and at the local cemetery. The Environmental Protection Agency did not stop the removal of the material until the AP began investigating in early March. … The sprawling piles came from a now-defunct timber mill that took thousands of trees from a forest tainted with asbestos from a nearby mine. … the forests around Libby are tainted with asbestos at least eight miles from the mine. The barbed asbestos fibers lodge themselves in cracks and crevices in the bark until they are released when disturbed or burned. … The EPA has spent more than $370 million over the past 11 years cleaning up Libby. Contractors in moon suits carting off tainted materials have become a constant reminder of the severity of the contamination.
Libby was the site of a now infamous W.R. Grace mine that lied to employees about what they were mining. The company kept up operations until 1990 and largely avoided responsiblity for their actions, including criminal charges [2]. The company made a few out of court settlements and lost several civil suits but most of the cost was passed onto the public. Clean up started in 2000, and another emergency was declared in 2009.
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Anti-Trust
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship – ACTA
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To all Members of the EU Parliament: As concerned global citizens, we call on you to stand for a free and open Internet and reject the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which would destroy it. The Internet is a crucial tool for people around the world to exchange ideas and promote democracy. We urge you to show true global leadership and protect our rights.
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They told Anonymous that blackmail would not work but had ignored NGOs for three years, then ignored people protesting in the streets. NGOs recommend signing the Avaaz petition above.
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The extremist position of ACTA will make the Internet fraught with danger for ordinary users. For example, if a blogger innocently links to another website, and that website, without their knowledge, infringes copyright in some way, they may well face criminal charges and prison time for “aiding and abetting” copyright infringement. … The provisions on Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) are so extreme as to be laughable. ACTA continues to demand that attempts to circumvent DRM be criminal offences, meaning that blind people could face jail time for attempting to read e-books using text-to-speech … merely renaming a file could become illegal.
Here’s another brief list of what’s wrong with ACTA
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Hundreds of people waged a street protest in Warsaw on Tuesday to protest the government’s plan to sign an international copyright treaty, while several popular websites also shut down for an hour over the issue. … Prime Minister Donald Tusk insisted Tuesday that his government will not give in to the protesters.
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the anti-SOPA/PIPA crowd seemed to have just discovered ACTA … to be in compliance with this agreement, the US needs to retain certain parts of copyright law that many reformers believe should be changed. At the very least, it ties Congress’ hands, if we want to be in compliance with our “international obligations.” … there are a few parts of ACTA that are so vague that you can definitely see how they could be interpreted to require changes to US law.
Most of the arguments against ACTA were about how it was made by publishers in secret because no one could say anything useful about it while it was a secret and there was little time to do anything between publication and signature. It’s still so vague that people can’t say anything useful about it other than it has a lot of harmful requirements and this so called “executive agreement” is an anti-democratic and unconstitutional sham the US should never have signed and only signed by claiming that it was not binding. The EU can still and should not sign because they know that the US considers it non binding.
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“I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly. … a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.” …The legally binding action happens in votes in parliaments; the national parliaments across Europe, and notably the European Parliament. … If parliament says no, any parliament, then no it is.
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the signatures of the EU member states and the EU itself will count for nothing unless the European Parliament gives its approval to ACTA in June, and digital activists have urged citizens to lobby their MEPs against voting yes.
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Another government shows it’s contempt for it’s people.
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There will be no consultation with the public, and he even wants to pass this without presenting it to the Dail [House of Representatives] Sean Sherlock is attempting to pass this law which will give the keys of regulation over to private industries and lobbying groups. These groups will then be able to pressure ISP’s into shutting down any website they want.
Here’s another description which claims the legislation is not subject to debate and will be passed by the end of the month. Context from Stop Sopa.
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This was a fight on a platform we’re not at this point comfortable with, and we were going up against an opponent that controls that platform.
Translation: they don’t have enough cenosrship power over the internet and will have to redouble their astroturf efforts.
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Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote. … Police have tried to pressure them into shutting down the doll protests, organisers said. “They tried to tell us our event was illegal – they even said that to put toys in the snow, we had to rent it from the city authorities,” Alexandrova said.
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Privacy
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Copyrights
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Researchers, please sign The Cost of Knowledge and tell Elsevier you will no longer cooperate with bad publishing policies.
For many years, academics have protested against the business practices of Elsevier. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below.
The list now has 312 people who have refused various cooperation such as publishing, refereeing and editorial work.
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This story has more details but you only have to see the two pictures to know the ruling is insane.
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01.24.12
Posted in Site News at 8:45 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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01.21.12
Posted in Site News at 9:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cross-posted in my personal blog where I write a lot these days
Summary: Personal take on what interests and motivates yours truly
LAST NIGHT I wrote a response to a very dear person. It was long and somewhat personal, so I decided to reduce it somewhat and present it to a wider audience in this blog.
Maybe it would tactless of me to bring this up and show the contrarian side in me, but some of my stronger opinions are better off said than kept inside. I wanted to explain some of my childhood experiences and what led me to the way I am. I very much doubt professional side of my life matters here, so I will focus on inter-personal and generally social aspects.
As a young child I am said to have been very happy, but once I was no longer a baby I became a little more isolated, probably by choice (again, as confirmed by my parents). I was drawn to art and sought encouragement and reaffirmation through that. I am still quite skillful at arts and some might say “creative”, but I abandoned this later on. My mother wanted me to be an architect like her cousin in Florida, so that too penetrated my mind at an early stage. My mother was extremely kind to me in my younger days and I always credit her for that. When I grew a little older I would confront some of my classmates (1st grade at school even). My gym teacher explain to my mom that I was non-conformist — about which he was right. He said that in a positive way, as means of explaining to my mom that I did not blindly accept the norms and acted to their rhythm. I thought for myself and judged things based on reason. This characteristic of mine became both a merit and a point of uniqueness in my adult life, but it was further accentuated when I started working on my Ph.D. in extreme freedom (of expression and action). Much later, in the late 20s perhaps, my non-conformism would extend or evolve to the scepticism movement — if movement it can be called at all. Sceptics demand evidence for claims that are made and challenge dubious claims under the premise that progress will be made assuming we can discard disinformation and bad social practices (sexism, slavery, racism, et cetera). With that in mind, my place in this world since the younger days can hopefully seem clearer. My career path and spotty life of romance (hardly as many relationships as other people in my shoes) can be understood. It was not a priority.
At school I was known as the one who would defend mistreated teachers rather than mischievous students who tormented the teachers to impress peers. It sometimes seemed like my teachers loved me more than my non-friends classmates did (I still get along very well with people far older than myself). I did have a good number of friends, but those who were not my friends were often what I consider “anti-social”. I often wondered what the heck I was doing among those people, whom I did not agree with and wanted never to be associated with (based on their behaviour alone). It was not that I had adversity with modern/Western lifestyle; it was a particular behavioural pattern (partly brought from repressed nations, at least in terms of what’s accepted and endorsed) that I simply could not accept. When I was 16 I decided that I would redo my life and on my own I eventually sorted everything out to this effect. My dad’s view on this was similar to mine all along, but with 4 kids at this stage he did not have the freedom of choice that I did.
Let me explain from a somewhat cynical point of view what these anti-social (or sociopathic) aspects that I speak of are about. They are better explained by some examples of what’s socially acceptable and even commended at times.
- Speeding on the road as a matter of being cool and taking pride in it, knowing darn well that it is not just a risk to oneself but the surrounding environment too. I strongly confronted people over these issues in my mid-teens, only to be met by hostility (yes, for insisting that laws are obeyed). Yeah, how dare I stand up for legal obedience?
- Mistreating girls and objectifying them. To explain this, perhaps some contextual information is needed as these practices are in part inherited from less progressive countries, such as Saudi Arabia. In many people it is still generally “uncool” to be a gentleman, but then again, some other countries that consider themselves to be civilised have not yet dodged this medieval tendency.
- Vocalism as the norm. Raising one’s voice and descending into shouting matches is not the exception when one loses an argument, choosing animal instinct over logic. Being a calm and normally quiet person myself, to be encircled by a pack of loud hyenas can be unpleasant. It also compels one to act alike. This too seems to be part of ancient culture, not necessary Western (speaking of a geographical trend). This vocalism extends somewhat to interrupting of a peer’s speech (sometimes using the might of one’s vocal chords), but to be fair, I see some of the same behaviour here in Britain’s finest places, depending on the person/environment at hand. It’s all down to debating culture and manners. In academia, for instance, people do not act this way, but then again, a lot of their staff lived and worked in different environments too, so there is a correlation there between behaviour and eventuality/locality. In other ways, it’s a correlation of selection, not causality; calm people are finding themselves attached to like-minded people and work peers/colleagues; those whose nature is not compatible get repelled or turned away.
These are just 3 examples, but many more could be given. In the age when “bad” means “good” (especially exemplified with black dialect in the US) we lose hope in sincerely good behaviour. It’s worse than rebellion, as rebels often have just causes to support, not something to prove through mistreatment of fellow human beings.
My rejection of militarisation is a separate but important point. One has to remember that students are not taught proper history at school. The curriculum is built to brainwash children in a particular way. Except studying of ancient history, there is — in some states — bible studies and then a time leap to the 20th century. They are not properly taught the history and politicians now gain power by pretending to have am imminent threat of existence, thereby recruiting for free and highly dangerous labour a lot of young people who die for an imperialist, expansionist agenda driven by nationlism and self-righteous claims of permission from above. The people who are joining the army are too young and immature to think for themselves and they are well indoctrinated in school — to the point where resisting the unthinkable does not cross their mind. The army makes people more aggressive, brutal, merciless, and rough. This is not acceptable in my eyes and to participate in such a system is to endorse and strengthen it. This whole part of the rant could be written a lot more eloquently, but it would require more thinking to be coherent. The short story is, the Western industry is excessively reliant on production of objects that kill people (not farming that feeds people), at one stage or another in the pipeline (metal industry, software for “defence” purposes). I wish never to spoil my identity and unleash bursts guilt by associating myself with this self-justifying, over-hyped, and self-serving (to leaders in power) game of Risk. People who served any military around the world resent me for this stance, but as I keep insisting, had there been a just (defensive) war, where on purely humanist factors there was a cause in joining the diffusion of the situation, I would be the first to join and even carry a firearm (if it needs to come to this). In most cases, based on history, people in power brainwash the population into thinking there is constant threat (like the “war on terror”) as it gives those in power yet more power and distracts the population away from the real war — class war. It’s an old trick and it has been used for millennia. The last think a leadership wants or needs is an informed public, unionised, eager to address real social injustices domestically or internationally.
This leads me to the last point, which is about racism. It is not good inductive reasoning, it’s an appeal to animal instinct and perhaps a decline to barbarism. In most countries there is some notion of “underclass”, but in some places it seems further exacerbated by the open use of labels, which television and broadcast at large permit, ruining people’s brain and breaking social constructs (removing the glue us human beings naturally have, perhaps sympathy/ubuntu). It is divisive and it produces unneeded hostility. The unifying umbrella ceases to be welfare of our fellow humans to whom we are innately compassionate; instead, it becomes nationalism (“us” versus “them”, where “them” typically refers to other/neighbouring nations or another mindset).
What it all boils down to is this; one needs to think objectively of how to serve society in a humane, productive way. Life is a journey not of money-making but of harmonious living, ideally with the education of others to the point where they too can appreciate it and improve their behaviour despite the constant brainwash.
As a sort of disclaimer, it is possible that adolescents in more countries are more or less the same, but I only grew up in one country with one set environment and a good school, so I might be too hard on those whom I know when it fact it’s an age phenomenon, not a demographic one. █
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Posted in Site News at 1:25 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Censorship
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Musicians say they were getting a better deal with MegaUpload and are angry the site was taken down.
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This story details some of the many non infringing uses and advantages of the service. The main reason people use file sharing services is that ISPs don’t provide reasonable bandwidth and non free software is intentionally limited and insecure. The software most people get with their computers lacks utilities like OpenSSH. US upload rates are still comparable to analog DSL and ISPs often block and rate limit anything that looks encrypted. Open Spectrum and free software are ways around this kind of censorship.
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So, when folks continue to allege that the bills target only illegal foreign sites, do they know better?
Groklaw does a SOPA opinion round up, quoting engineers, artists and lawmakers.
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As an industry, we’ve been able to rationalize that bad laws and politics don’t matter, but now we’re waking up. More importantly, this has also gotten the attention of “the Internet,” meaning a lot of the people who use the Net. That includes some really smart Hill staffers who believe in the democratic potential of the Net.
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Referring to Hollywood, Y Combinator wrote: ”The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise.” The blog post, which was titled “Kill Hollywood,” also offered advice to start-ups and entrepreneurs who wanted to help to hasten its demise.
This is a good idea and it’s time has come. Digital production and distribution are so cheap that there’s no longer a reason for resources to be concentrated in any one place or for a small number of firms to have a lock on our imaginations.
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How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?
The silly, pro-Microsoft and anti-Google statements in this article almost kept me from linking to it.
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01.20.12
Posted in Site News at 5:08 pm by Guest Editorial Team
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Management is interfering less and techs at big businesses want their freedom and performance as much as anyone else.
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I wrote about the technical details of supporting the UEFI secure boot specification with Linux. Despite me pretty clearly saying that this was ignoring issues of licensing and key distribution and the like, people are now using it to claim that Linux could support secure boot with minimal effort. … We can write the code required to support secure boot on Linux in a minimal amount of time – in fact, most of it’s now done. But significant practical problems remain, and so far we have no workable solutions for any of them.
The key distribution looks like the nastiest of the issues. If there’s no certifying authority and you can’t run without signed code, everyone will have to sign everything themselves before installation or distributions will have to carry binaries for each and every key. The practical dificulties of “custom mode” are also a significant concern. The Register’s summary raises the ARM lockout but repeats Microsoft’s talking points about lockdowns magically making Windows safe and stable.
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Hardware
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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According to MIT’s Technology Review, the THz waves used by the scanners “unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.
This is a version of the dreaded porno scanners used in airports. The thing can undress you at 16 feet.
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If police forces nationwide seem to be taking similar steps against the Occupy movement, it’s not a coincidence: Police chiefs in cities with occupations going on have been getting together to discuss strategies and tactics, including via conference calls organized by the Police Executive Research Forum, an association of law-enforcement officials.
Reporters of all political stripes around the country were kept away from protests, harassed and arrested by thuggish and taunting police officers. Some were pepper sprayed and injured.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Finance
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Jeffrey Verschleiser is one of the biggest assholes in the entire world! … Whenever any right-wing loon, or Bloombergite, tries to tell you the mortgage crisis was caused by the government forcing the poor banks to lend to broke black people, please direct them to this passage. The banks not only wanted to give out these loans, they wanted to give them out at the speed of light. They wanted to crank them out so fast that their own auditors literally couldn’t read the writing on the loan applications.
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Censorship
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When we first launched SOPA Opera, few members in Congress – besides the bills’ co-sponsors and its initial opponents – had made their opinion known on the proposed laws to regulate the Internet. That changed on Wednesday.
The split is not as good as the graph makes it out because 41 of the 101 opposition leave open a vote for a modified version of PIPA or SOPA – so one of these nasty bills can still pass. Everyone knows there’s huge popular opposition now.
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Forget SOPA and PIPA, apparently the US Federal Government doesn’t need new legislation in place to shut down major file storage sites and lock millions of users out of their file lockers. The bigger question, then, is who’s next? … It’s the new war on drugs. The plan is to have taxpayers foot the bill and then attack websites … MegaUpload’s downfall was that they seemingly promoted the sharing of copy-written material. … [and] actively hiding the fact its users shared illegal content … The case of TVShack and Richard O’Dwyer is slightly different. … the young British student is now facing extradition to the US for simply linking to sites hosting illegal content. … a crime which could land him in a US jail for five to ten years under pre-SOPA and PIPA laws.
It’s like mp3.com all over again, except this time the bullies will throw foreign site owners in US jails. The charges against MegaUpload are also contradictory. If the site was concealing and deleting rather than promoting music and movies owned by jerks, the jerks should have been happy. Michael Mozart accuses big publishers of promoting copyright infringment, will the DOJ shut down CBS and friends?
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I think what really happened is that UMG realized how powerful our message was, how potent it would become, and how positively it would affect Mega’s image. From rogue to vogue. They decided to stop us at all costs … UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations direct to consumers and allowing artists to keep 90% of earnings. … We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free. Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads.
That is exactly like mp3.com. The shutdown is not about “piracy” it’s about eliminating competition.
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MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd gave an interview to the New York Times yesterday, in which “Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise.” … there is no need to assume that legislation is necessary. As we discuss the future of the Internet, all stakeholders, including the people who use Internet services and consume (and create and share) movies and music, must have a seat at the table. The internet is too important to be debated, dissected and possibly disabled in a private meeting.
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Some people predicted that the blackout would harm Wikipedia’s reputation. The opposite happened.
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The Indian government has given the green light for the prosecution of “21 social networking sites.” The list features 10 foreign-based companies, and could affect websites provided by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube.
Techdirt reported on this several weeks ago. The case has received official sanction from more levels of government and represents a real threat now.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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We must be prepared to battle censorship on the Internet as a matter of our everyday lives. … Educational campaigns explaining why the battles against Internet censorship are so crucial must continue on our sites, and in our other personal and professional communications as well, every single day.
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DRM
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Copyrights
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01.19.12
Posted in Site News at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cult behaviour at Apple
Summary: The appearance of Steve Jobs is ‘property’ of Apple based on the company’s very ludicrous actions
AS we pointed out some days ago, Apple sought to block reproduction of its dear leader’s appearance, which would make a dangerous precedence (a form of censorship).
According to reports such as this, Apple got its way. But more importantly, Apple, a patents and trademarks aggressor, also did this when he was alive, so those who use mortality as a factor miss the point. As one blog put it:
The 12-inch doll made a stir when news of its development emerged earlier this month. Commenters noted its uncanny resemblance to Jobs, who died Oct. 5.
Legal action was all but certain given an incident last year in which Apple successfully blocked the Chinese company MiC Gadget from producing a doll with Jobs’ likeness.
Here is more information on this subject:
In Icons drew a lot of attention when it announced it would be selling a Steve Jobs doll (“12in collectible figure” may be more accurate, but it’s also on the verbose side).
Compared with many representations of well-known figures, the prototype was a remarkable likeness to the extent that some people thought it fell into the ‘uncanny valley’ where the resemblance is so close it doesn’t really look like a model but the slight lack of realism makes it seem somehow creepy.
It does not look creepy, but Apple shut it down anyway. The creepy thing is the real character of Steve Jobs, who was not a nice person. In other news from China, Apple gets the egg treatment:
Apple halted sales of its iPhone 4S in Beijing and Shanghai on Friday after scuffles broke out over a delayed launch of the device, sending a shopper hurling eggs at one of its stores in the capital.
The Inquirer has more:
According to a report at Reuters, as soon as word spread that handsets were unavailable people began getting agitated, and as well as throwing around perfectly good eggs engaged in shoving matches with the police.
Apple deserves this for its aggression with patents. In fact, Apple deserves a lot worse and Cringely thinks that Apple might get sued for patent violations in Siri, which many people tactlessly claim to be an Apple “innovation” (there is prior art). To quote:
I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine. Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph. The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.
We are still urging for an Apple boycott. The company’s behaviour is appalling and it does a lot of damage to science and technology. Equally manacling are the company’s followers, who act on faith rather than facts. █
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