• Hardware

  • Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?

    Something sounded familiar last week when I heard U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski make a huge pitch for infusing digital technology into America’s classrooms. … “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools…. Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.” … The year was 1913, and the speaker, Thomas Edison, was referring to the prospect of replacing book learning with instruction via the moving image.

    It’s funny how every time a new way of delivering moving images is created, people say that moving images will replace textbooks. This editoral shows how Apple is self interested and their push into schools is more of the same. Never the less, cheap tablets and free texts can get information where it needs to be at less cost than paper and those tablets also form an important media and communications platform. iPads should be avoided, because they are expensive, fragile and non free. OLPC should be promoted.

• Security

  • Trustwave, a CA authority, apparently issued a certificate that allowed the cert owner to then issue valid certificates to facilitate man-in-the-middle attacks on their own employees.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Air Marshals Gone Wild! Tales Of Sexism, Suicide and Bigotry

    Managers at the Federal Air Marshal Service regularly made fun of blacks, Latinos and gays, took taxpayer-paid trips to visit families and vacation spots, and acted like a “bunch of school kid punks,” … “The culture is, hate African Americans, hate females, go after gays and lesbians cause we don’t like the way they think,” said former air marshal Steve Theodoropoulos.

  • Leigh Van Bryan And Emily Bunting [interrogated, jailed, sent home and] Banned From Entering US After Twitter Joke About ‘Destroying America’

    “I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me ‘you’ve really f***ed up with that tweet, boy’.”

    This story of police sadism also belongs under privacy because US government clerks are monitoring your Twitter conversations.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • proof of profit in sustainable fisheries

    if all fisheries around the world were better managed, they would be worth $50bn a year more than their current total contribution of $274bn to global GDP. But the number of fisheries that are subject to a sustainable management programme are still a minority, and global fish stocks are falling fast.

  • US Citizens: Tell Southern Company: Stop leading the nation in climate pollution.

    They won’t listen but popular outcry will make it easier to pass laws and enforce them.

• Finance

  • The ideology of global trade is endangering food production and impoverishing the poor. It could stir up massive riots.

• Anti-Trust, Shake up at what’s left of Yahoo!

  • How the Microsoft search deal is reshaping Yahoo’s business, for better or worse

    The Yahoo chart above, taken from its presentation to investors today, shows how that revenue sharing has impacted the company financially over the past year. Yahoo’s 2011 annual revenue was $4.38 billion, down 5 percent, and Yahoo said today that the decrease was “primarily due to the revenue share related to the Search Agreement with Microsoft.”

  • Yahoo! Releases Chairman’s Update for Shareholders

    following this year’s Annual Meeting a majority of Yahoo!’s directors will be new to the board this year, and all directors will have joined the board since 2010.

  • Alibaba Suspended as Buyback of Yahoo Stake Looms With Loan

    Alibaba.com Ltd. suspended its shares from trading in Hong Kong as the company prepares a statement about a transaction involving its parent, which is raising about $3 billion to buy back stock held by Yahoo! Inc. … Yahoo said Feb. 7 it is “devoting significant resources” to talks that may lead to the sale of its Asian assets, valued at more than $10 billion.

    The article speculates that this is a result of the recent Yahoo management shake up and that Yahoo Japan may also be up for sale. Watch for large portions of this money to find it’s way back to Microsoft and for Yahoo to go the way of Novell.

  • Silver Lake Takes on the Big Fish

    Emboldened by its success earlier this year with the $8.5 billion sale of Skype to Microsoft Corp., the technology-focused firm is hoping to orchestrate a deal to buy all or part of Yahoo, … Silver Lake has held talks with Microsoft, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and other potential partners about a bid for Yahoo, people familiar with the matter said.

    PJ reminds us of background on the Bill Gates/Silver Lake connection. She should have pointed to her own article and other nasties she’s noted in the past, [how they shafted Skype's directors and employees, Michael Bingle, Managing Director of Silver Lake, is also on the board of Gartner, and here's a little history on that., and this Silver Lake background] So is Bill Gates aiming to suck up Yahoo’s money and patents?

  • Yahoo’s Patents Are Very Valuable, Jackson Says

    Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital LLC, talks about the outlook for Yahoo! Inc. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Softbank Corp. are talking with private-equity funds about making a bid for all of Yahoo without the company’s blessing, people with knowledge of the matter said. Jackson speaks with Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.”

    PJ put this into perspective, “The video is from early November, but it is the first I’ve seen that explains the patent aspect of the Yahoo struggle. Once again, we see patents, and the dreams of wealth from its weaponry, doing real damage to an American company.”

  • Anti-Trust, attacks on Android

    • IHS: $199 Kindle Fire costs only $201.70 to make

      This estimate matches a previous one by the company building the $35 Indian tablet. PJ asks, “does that mean that if it were not for Microsoft forcing a patent license deal, if it was similar to the one offered to Barnes & Noble, that Amazon would be making a profit on each unit instead of losing on each one? And what about the limitations? Are they mandated by the license or by having to pay Microsoft so much? Could someone study that, please? Maybe Amazon can pay, but what about smaller firms? Is it not a drag, then, on innovation? On competition?” Amazon is more like controlled opposition than a Microsoft competitor.

    • Lawyers Rebut FOSSpatents’ FRAND

      No matter how often he’s corrected, Florian will continue to spout the same things. FRAND is fraud in the first place and PJ explains the silly game Microsoft is up to now, “Apple and Microsoft would like to *change* FRAND terms to include a waiver of injunctions, which isn’t now part of FRAND requirements. In fact, it’s an equitable remedy. They’d like it to be removed as a defensive move, in order to disarm Android vendors, especially now that Google is buying Motorola. In short, it’s not so much about loving standards all of a sudden as wanting to win by disarming the other side. And then there is the problem that no one can build a smartphone without paying so much for patents they can’t make a profit. This is now hitting Apple and Microsoft too.” See also, Microsoft Shift on Industry-Standard Patents Aimed at Google

    Nokia Round Up

    • Nokia to Cut 4,000 Jobs at 3 Factories

      The company said the cuts would be made at three Nokia factories – in Komarom, Hungary; Reynosa, Mexico; and Salo, Finland – as it transferred the assembly of smartphones to factories in Asia, which are closer to component makers.

    • Nokia Numbers Show Microsoft’s Mobile Madness

      Nokia said it “sold” 1 million Lumia devices in the quarter (in quotations because there is no easy way to tell how many units actually made it to consumers or are simply idling in channel inventories). That means every Windows Phone 7 device Nokia shipped in Q4 cost Microsoft $250, minus the royalty. That’s for phones, like the Lumia 710, that can be bought for $50 or less with a standard carrier contract.

      The size of Microsoft’s “bribe” to Nokia is questionable because Nokia was forced to throw away their successful gnu/linux phones and their resources are being plundered to advertise Microsoft’s software.

    • Microsoft’s Nokia blood money potentially strangling other Windows Phone OEMs

      Nokia’s low price on the Lumia 900 is likely to harm HTC and Samsung phones in the US. Given the size of Microsoft’s payment to Nokia, it’s simple to wonder if some of that sweet, sweet Redmond cash is being used to keep Nokia’s phones artificially cheap.

      It’s called dumping.

    • Walmart offers the Lumia 710 for free

      Nokia’s goal with the Lumia 710 is to establish it as the smartphone for consumers on a budget.
      Now, Walmart is helping to take that goal to the next level. The discount retailer has begun offering the phone at no cost to those who sign up for a new two-year service agreement with T-Mobile.

      The phone is only free if your time and communications are worth nothing. Windows phones are infamously bad. Because Microsoft has shut down the factories that once made Nokia’s phones and replaced all the software, the Nokia label means nothing.

    Barnes and Noble Round Up.

    • Some Really Good News for Barnes and Noble; and Microsoft Withdraws Another Patent ~pj

      If I were a FUDster, I’d write that this means Barnes & Noble has prevailed, but I just tell you the truth, which is that this is one step in a longer process. It is, undeniably, however, fabulously good news for Barnes & Noble.

    • Barnes and Noble Backed by U.S. Agency Staff in Microsoft Case

      Barnes & Noble Inc. should win a patent-infringement case brought by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) that threatens to halt imports of the bookseller’s Nook e-reader, according to staff of the U.S. trade agency hearing the dispute. Jeff Hsu, a staff attorney at the U.S. International Trade Commission, said today in an interview he is recommending that ITC Judge Theodore Essex find there was no violation by Barnes & Noble of three Microsoft patents.

    • The Latest on the Barnes and Noble Patent Misuse Defense – Some AntiFUD ~pj

      I’m seeing a couple of articles about an initial determination by the ITC against Barnes & Noble on its patent misuse defense, and there’s quite a lot of spin on the ball, thanks to the usual suspects. They are reading a lot into a title of a sealed document. I see many misstatements. … the title of the sealed ITC initial determination is called an *initial* determination for a reason.

    • Nokia sells over 450 patents, some of them deemed essential to GSM, to a patent troll

      Sisvel just announced that they’re acquiring 47 patent families from Nokia, giving them more than 450 new patents that they can add to their arsenal. What’s surprising is that 33 of the patent families, which come in at somewhere over 350 patents, are defined by Nokia as essential to 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies….What’s Elop up to?

      PJ adds, ” Ask Barnes & Noble about the Nokia patents sold to MOSAID and what it thinks it means.”

    • Say, what? Seattle MandA expert says Microsoft should buy Barnes and Noble

      It is doubtful Microsoft has the money or that the deal would pass anti-trust scrutiny. Microsoft will continue to screw B&N in court to destroy them and Android and will only be happy if both are ruined.

    • Background: The Bookstore’s Last Stand

      It might come as a surprise, but Mr. Lynch says Barnes & Noble is, in fact, a technology company. … But he is playing [$719 million] David to Mr. Bezos’s Goliath [$88 billion, Microsoft partner]. … A bit of good news for the company is that, thanks to the Nook, it’s been grabbing e-book business from Amazon. Mr. Lynch said Barnes & Noble now held about 27 percent of the market, a number that publishers confirm gleefully

      see also, Barnes and Noble, Destroyer of Indie Bookstores, Is Now Printed Books’ Last Great Champion

  • Privacy

    • US body probes RIM, Nokia, Apple backdoor claims

      A US government body is investigating allegations that mobile device manufacturers Apple, RIM and Nokia allowed Indian military intelligence backdoor access to communications in exchange for Indian market presence….

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Jury rules that Eolas’s “interactive web” patent is invalid

      Eolas, a patent troll that has been shaking down technology companies for the better part of a decade, now faces the prospect of losing the patent…. Berners-Lee took to Twitter to cheer the decision. “Texas jury agreed Eolas 906 patent invalid,” he wrote. “Good thing too!” … [and] “We are pleased that the court found the patents invalid, as it affirms our assertion that the claims are without merit,” a Google spokesperson told Ars.

    • Big Brother’s Diet Method Patent, How Far Is Too Far In Encouraging Healthy Eating

      The title of the ’492 patent is “Providing Consumers With Incentives For Healthy Eating Habits,” but when does a system move from merely a personal incentive for which one can opt in to a system that may be imposed by the government or an employer? … “Consumption of healthy food may be monitored, for example, according to food purchases, food discarded, and food indicated by a consumer to have been eaten.” Is someone going to dig through your trash to see what you have eaten?

      They might indeed dig through your trash with rfid enabled garbage trucks, though I’m not sure how they will tell if the item has been eaten. They already know your purchases and that alone will can be abused by health insurance companies. If people cared about healthy food, we’d have better food purity laws. Monitoring will just be another excuse for the rich and powerful to deny medicine to the poor and punish people who threaten them.

    • Patents for Humanity Announced at White House Event

      Against all evidence, the White House pretends patents are beneficial and promotes more of them.

    • Trademarks

      • Shattering pyrex To Show A Massive Weakness In Trademark Law

        Imagine if a counterfeiter were passing off soda lime glass as Pyrex. The outcry would be huge. Government agencies would be busting down doors and arresting people and using it as a reason to pass ACTA. But if Corning and their licensees do it under the Pyrex brand, all we can do is shrug.

        and they did do just that. Watch out for “pyrex” because it’s not “PYREX”.

    • Copyrights

      • Scientists and innovators: You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journals

        people joining in the new boycott have no excuses not to follow through. There are plenty of viable OA options and it is simply unacceptable for any scientist who decries Elsevier’s actions and believes that the subscription based model is no longer serving science to send a single additional paper to journals that do not provide full OA to every paper they publish.

        Open Access journal articles are cited more often than those locked behind paywalls now, so self interest if firmly on the side of the boycott.

      • The Sky Is Rising

        For years now, the legacy entertainment industry has been predicting its own demise, claiming that the rise of technology, by enabling easy duplication and sharing — and thus copyright infringement — is destroying their bottom line. If left unchecked, they say, it is not only they that will suffer, but also the content creators, who will be deprived of a means to make a living. And, with artists lacking an incentive to create, no more art will be produced, starving our culture. While it seems obvious to many that this could not possibly be true, since creators and performers of artistic content existed long before the gatekeepers ever did, we’ve looked into the numbers to get an honest picture of the state of things. What we found is that not only is the sky not falling, as some would have us believe, but it appears that we’re living through an incredible period of abundance and opportunity, with more people producing more content and more money being made than ever before.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/02/10/links-anti-trust-roundups-yahoo-nokia-barns-and-nobel/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/02/07/links-msnokia-passes-blame-bill-gates-pushes-gmos-open-access-news/ http://techrights.org/2012/02/07/links-msnokia-passes-blame-bill-gates-pushes-gmos-open-access-news/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:40:02 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57864 Reader’s Picks

    • Libre Office community grows and works

    • New Hampshire Law Demands Free Software and Open Standards

    • Science

      • Not so superior after all.

    • Hardware

      • Nokia CEO Blames Salesmen For Windows Phone Struggles

        “Steven Elop of Nokia has placed some of the blame for the struggles of Windows Phone on mobile phone shops — for not pushing it. As The Register points out, sales staff ‘want their commission,’ and tend to only show phones they think might sell. Exact details of Windows Phone sales numbers are being covered up by both Microsoft and Nokia, who refuse to state specifics; sales figures to operators are stated at one million, but the majority of those seem to be unsold to consumers, and neither Microsoft nor Nokia will give numbers on activations… if the Nokia N9 had been available in all markets, it might have sold almost 5M units and pushed Nokia into profitability

        See also, this previous article on where patents go.

    • Health/Nutrition

      • UCSF: Societal Control of Sugar Essential to Ease Public Health Burden.

        sugar is toxic beyond its calories … At the levels consumed by most Americans, sugar changes metabolism, raises blood pressure, critically alters the signaling of hormones and causes significant damage to the liver … “We’re not talking prohibition,” Schmidt [PhD, MSW, MPH] said. “We’re not advocating a major imposition of the government into people’s lives. … What we want is to actually increase people’s choices by making foods that aren’t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.”

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Beat down in Dallas

        There have been many raids like this in the war against drugs. As US police are militarized there are more injuries and deaths.

    • Cablegate

      • Anonymous Leaks Huge Cache of Emails From Iraq War Crimes Case

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • More Damning Evidence Points to Pesticide [Bayer-produced imidacloprid] as Cause of Mass Bee Deaths

      • Climate Emergency: 2 Million Mexicans Have No Water & Drought Expanding Across Southern U.S.

        Two million people have no water. Crops are wiped out in the northern half of the country. The worst drought in Mexico’s history is likely to worsen until summer rains come devastating the northern half of Mexico, damaging Mexico’s economy. Indigenous communities in rural northern Mexico have no water, no food and no crops. Communities have had no rain in 15 months. … Most scientists are careful not to link specific weather events to climate change trends, but NASA’s James Hansen and two colleagues from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University have taken that plunge. They’ve gathered data they say shows that the 2011 Texas and Oklahoma heat wave—as well as a deadly Moscow heat in 2010—were “a consequence of global warming because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming.”

      • Leaked data: Palm biodiesel as dirty as fuel from tar sands

        There are good biofuels and bad biofuels and the worst are as filthy as the foulest fossil fuels. But the good biofuels are essential to tackling climate change

        Lovelock’s carbon sequestering of agricultural waste is not mentioned.

      • What Bill Gates Doesn’t Know About GMOs

        It is also true that more people than ever before are going hungry, needlessly. We have enough food to go around now. We disagree with Gates on two points—one scientific and one political. … Most of the rest of the world’s experts agree that GMOs are not what the world’s poor need to feed themselves. … We must finally recognize that hunger is a problem of poverty and access to resources, especially land, not agricultural yield. … stop kicking farmers off their land and dumping product on the world market that puts them out of business; protect farmers’ rights to save and exchange seed; kick the bankers out of food-crop commodities speculation… ; write fair trade policies; listen to the world’s poor, they know what they need…in short, democratize food and farming if you want to address hunger.

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • CreativeAmerica Literally Resorts To Buying Signatures

    • Censorship

      • ‘Gasland’ Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans

        Josh Fox tells us what happened here, “This was an act of civil disobedience, yes done in an impromptu fashion, but at the moment when they told me to turn off the cameras, I could not. I know my rights and I felt it was imperative to exercise them.”

      • ACTA’s EU future in doubt after Polish pause

        Keep up the pressure, it works.

      • We need copyright reform, not ACTA

        As a Member of the European Parliament, I very much welcome the increased attention the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has received in the past weeks. It has taken a while for massive outcry to emerge, but we are seeing protest voices getting louder and louder.

    • Privacy

      • URGENT: Congress Pushing Broad New Internet Snooping Bill

      • Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers see also this

        Developer Matt Gemmell asked Morin if Path was violating Apple’s Terms and Conditions by not asking users to opt into uploading their address book. Morin said, “This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we’ve been proactively addressing this.”

        Reactive when caught is the new proactive? Free software is the only solution to spyware and other malware.

    • Civil Rights

      • Awards given to recognize the world’s nastiest companies

      • One Town’s War on Gay Teens

        In Michele Bachmann’s home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

      • Soaking the Poor, State by State

        There’s not one single state with a tax system that’s progressive. … in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent.

    • Copyrights

      • Thousands of Scientists Vow to Boycott Elsevier to Protest Journal Prices

        Price is just one part of scientists problem which is “easily-accessible distribution of their work.” If you are doing research and would like to publish it, Elsevier and other big publishers will make it hard to read. Please sign The Cost of Knoledge Petition

      • G.O.P. Candidates Are Told, Don’t Use the Verses, It’s Not Your Song
        Romney and Gingrich Pull Songs After Complaints

        Powerful people are used to violating copyright laws for advertisements with impunity but Republicans are now so odious that musicians sue for otherwise licensed public performance. Musician feel damaged when Republicans use their music and sue for false advertising when people think the musician has endorsed the candidate.

      • ESR offers Open Access people advice

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/02/07/links-msnokia-passes-blame-bill-gates-pushes-gmos-open-access-news/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/02/01/links-more-censorship-attacks-us-telcos-try-to-knife-tv-whitespace-baby/ http://techrights.org/2012/02/01/links-more-censorship-attacks-us-telcos-try-to-knife-tv-whitespace-baby/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:01:44 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57804 Reader’s Picks

    • How to do 3D screen casts with Blender

    • Science

      • The Lancet: The Research Works Act: a damaging threat to science

        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.

      • Researchers Decode Words from the Brain’s Auditory Activity

    • Health/Nutrition

      • FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal e-mail.

        The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show. … Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges.

        People often claim that they can’t do their work without Windows. This is a case where the unjust power of non free software made it impossible for people to do their job for you.

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • NDAA used to retroactively justify indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay.

    • Finance

      • The Austerity Debacle

        The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist — or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook “Economics” — could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea.

      • Philanthropy is the enemy of justice

        The world’s poor are not begging for charity from the rich – they’re asking for justice and fairness … there is the vexed question of whether these billions are really the billionaires’ to give away in the first place. … Bill Gates himself may not indeed have known about what the AeA was doing on Microsoft’s behalf, but the fact remains that if a philanthropist’s money comes from externalising corporate costs to taxpayers, and that if Microsoft is listed for its own tax purposes as a partly Puerto Rican and Singaporean company, then the real philanthropists behind these glittering foundations might be a sight more ragged-trousered than Bill and Melinda.

      • Goldman Sachs and Occupy Wall Street’s bank: the real story

        Goldman’s “Urban Investment Group” representative had stated in a phone conversation that Occupy’s credit union will never get another dime from any big bank … Peoples’ Del Rio dismisses such threats, but I don’t. These Community Reinvestment funds ultimately come from public pockets, so why should the titans of Wall Street be allowed to bully community credit unions, which are answerable to their members, not Goldman’s partners?

        It is not at all surprising that the banks that cut off wikileaks would also cut off a bank serving OWS. If this is legal, it should not be.

    • Anti-Trust

      • New study in ‘Social Policy and Society’ journal supports link between inequality and crime

        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.

      • The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

        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.

    • Censorship

      • Sneaking 3 Horrible Wireless Ideas into One Bill

        … 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.

      • Lawrence Lessig: After the Battle Against SOPA—What’s Next?

        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.

      • Reppresive governments around the world rave about Twitter’s new censorship tools.

        Here’s a report of Occupy Oakland being censored

      • RIAA/MPAA demand search engine censorship

        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.

      • Canadians from all corners of industry, culture, education, law and civil society oppose Canada’s SOPA

      • Copying Is Not Theft, But Censorship Is

        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.

      • A Let them eat cake moment from Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman: A ‘Mob Mentality’ Killed PIPA and SOPA

        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.

      • Hang The Pirates — But Start With The Movie Moguls And Record Execs

        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.”

    • Privacy

      • FBI seeks Big Brother-’Minority Report’ hybrid

        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.”

      • The US Navy builds a similar system and considers freedom an infection.

        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.

      • Proposed congressional bill targets Carrier IQ and other mobile tracking software

        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.

      • CNN reports on TSA “VIPR” searches for trains, busses and highways.

        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.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/02/01/links-more-censorship-attacks-us-telcos-try-to-knife-tv-whitespace-baby/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/29/links-please-sign-the-avaaz-petition-against-acta/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/29/links-please-sign-the-avaaz-petition-against-acta/#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:48:46 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57697 Reader’s Picks

    • Iron Sky on Tour in Berlin 11.02.2012 18:00

      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!

    • Ubuntu’s HUD: Why It’s A Great Idea

    • Hardware

      • Smartphones Cutting Into Laptops Internet Market Share

        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 …

      • N9 outsells Lumina despite big, expensive push.

        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.

      • $265 Spark tablet runs Plasma Active Linux software – Liliputing

      • How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

        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.

    • Security

      • RT looks at NSA backdoors to Windows

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Iran’s nuclear scientists are not being assassinated. They are being murdered

        Killing our enemies abroad is just state-sponsored terror – whatever euphemism western leaders like to use

      • Police needlessly harass protesters in Portland, OR

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • With Prevalence of Nanomaterials Rising, Panel Urges Review of Risks

        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

      • Mothers, grandmothers speak out about children’s health problems after BP disaster (video)

        They got sick and are still sick.

      • Dumping dioxin on Dixie

        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.

      • EPA faces lawsuit over coal-ash rule delay

        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.

      • Old News, Libby, Montana: New Danger Found In Asbestos-Plagued Town

        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.

    • Anti-Trust

      • Microsoft mouthpiece claims $1 billion per year subsidies from Microsoft to Nokia and predicts phone dumping.

        There are other exchanges that may nullify this, such as $350 million in advertising from Nokia.

    • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

      • Monsanto & Cancer Milk: FOX NEWS KILLS STORY & FIRES Reporters.

        Video interview with reporters threatened and fired by Fox News for doing their job.

    • Censorship – ACTA

      • Europeans, please sign this petition against ACTA

        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.

      • How the Polish government ignored overwhelming opposition to signing ACTA.

        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.

      • ACTA – the latest threat to internet freedom, just signed by the EU

        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

      • Poles Protest ACTA Online and on the Streets

        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.

      • What Is ACTA And Why Is It A Problem?

        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.

      • ACTA signed by EU Commission, EU ACTA Chief Resigns in Disgust

        “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.

      • UK signs ACTA as activists urge resistance

        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.

      • Poland signs copyright treaty that drew protests

        Another government shows it’s contempt for it’s people.

      • Sean Sherlock an Irish TD [Congressman essentially] has decided that now is the time to sign an anti-piracy law; the Irish SOPA

        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.

      • Hollywood’s twisted opinion of SOPA defeat

        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.

      • Doll ‘protesters’ present small problem for Russian police

        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.

    • Privacy

      • Hawaii may keep track of all Web sites visited

        The measure, H.B. 2288, says “Internet destination history information” and “subscriber’s information” such as name and address must be saved for two years. … In Washington, D.C., the fight over data retention requirements has been simmering since the Justice Department pushed the topic in 2005, a development that was first reported by CNET. Proposals publicly surfaced in the U.S. Congress the following year, and President Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said it’s an issue that “must be addressed.” So, eventually, did FBI director Robert Mueller.

        These people hate your freedom.

      • DARPA project creates tiny spy computer

        Every non free computer your house with a microphone and network card can be used in the same way.

    • Copyrights

      • 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.

      • In UK: Similar, but not copied, image found to breach copyright

        This story has more details but you only have to see the two pictures to know the ruling is insane.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/29/links-please-sign-the-avaaz-petition-against-acta/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/24/links-lots-of-censorship-and-astroturf-sopamegaupload-backlashes-bring-informed-opinion-into-the-political-process/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/24/links-lots-of-censorship-and-astroturf-sopamegaupload-backlashes-bring-informed-opinion-into-the-political-process/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:45:39 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57587 Reader’s Picks

    • Microsoft Office’s EULA restricts use, just like iBooks Author.

      the Microsoft Office Home & Student license says that the software “may not be used for commercial, non- profit, or revenue-generating activities.” … The Microsoft restriction appears to be even more restrictive, and would include files. In other words, if I write a book using Microsoft Office Home & Student and sell it for money, haven’t I used the software for commercial or revenue-generating activities?

      Again the attitude is “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”

    • Health/Nutrition

      • Dish size and color influence portion size leading to obesity.

        You want a plate that is 10 inches or smaller and has a high contrast with your food. If you don’t want lots of colored plates, a pattern might help. You also want a table that contrasts with your plate. People who need to eat more should reverse these suggestions. The paper is worth downloading and reading.

    • Security

      • US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux

        The credential-stealing malware, first reported by Wired, made its way from a portable hard drive onto ground systems, which control the drones’ weapons and surveillance functions. Portable disks are used to load map updates and transfer mission videos from one computer to another, Defense News added. … Behind the scenes other changes appear to have been made: screenshots of drone control computers uploaded by security researcher Mikko Hypponen suggest that at least some of the consoles have been migrated from Microsoft Windows to open source Linux.

      • Defence/Police/Aggression

        • EU Iran sanctions: Ministers adopt Iran oil imports ban

          Follow the money to understand this counter productive war mongering which will mostly benefit China and Iran.

      • Finance

        • America Beyond Capitalism

          Exploratory efforts are currently underway to replicate aspects of the Cleveland model in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and several other communities. The “demonstration effect” of the highly unorthodox model has also begun to challenge community organizers to find ways to incorporate worker-owned development into grassroots activist strategies. … The idea of creating wealth, not simply jobs, also has a powerful resonance. The Evergreen model takes us well past token job creation at minimum wages in states like Rick Perry’s Texas, to a very different conception of what people deserve and ought to be able to have.

      • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

        • Supremely Unseemly Conduct by Supreme Court Justices Spurs Call for Mandatory Ethics Rules

          Justice Antonin Scalia (75, an appointee of Ronald Reagan) and Justice Clarence Thomas (63, an appointee of George H.W. Bush) have attended exclusive events at private resorts orchestrated by the billionaire oil barons Charles and David Koch, which the brothers use to advance their partisan political agenda. (A copy of the Koch Industries invitation and briefing material is uploaded below.) Justice Thomas has also accepted gifts of travel on the private jets of billionaire Harlan Crow, and he has not been fully forthcoming about the income and political activities of his wife, Ginny Thomas, who launched a group, Liberty Central, to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in the case that struck down election rules, “Citizens United,”

        • Justice Scalia On Unlimited Political Ads: Turn Off The TV

          Scalia spent more than 10 minutes lamenting the way confirmation hearings for new justices are now held in the U.S. Senate. He said lawmakers are now more concerned with making sure a prospective member of the court will interpret the Constitution they want, instead of the way the founding fathers wrote it.

          If we are supposed to ignore the way our leaders are chosen, he should do the same for his peers.

        • ALEC Politician Claims ALEC Meetings Are “Open to the Public.” Really?

          That would be breaking news to both traditional press and the online media that have been blocked from ALEC meetings and are increasingly being threatened with arrest. … Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan was a dues paying member of ALEC last summer, but was ejected anyway from the New Orleans cigar party for ALEC members and lobbyists sponsored by Reynolds. Pocan did go on to write a widely circulated piece for The Progressive magazine about his experience, “Inside the ALEC Dating Service.”

        • The Alcohol Industry’s Stealth “Joe Camel” Strategy

          the U.S. Surgeon General in 2007 declared underage drinking a public health crisis, the practices of the alcohol industry have largely escaped notice and have simply not been a priority for public health agencies. Diageo and other brands of alcohol have extended their reach into the youth market by routinely advertising on social network sites, interactive websites, internet games, and by using viral marketing tactics and YouTube videos, all of which are largely unregulated and have a high likelihood of reaching underage audiences. … By 2009, a study on adolescent drug use showed 64 percent of 8th graders reported regularly using alcopops.

        • PR Firm Caught Editing Wikipedia

          Anheuser-Busch’s United Kingdom division, InBev, employed a lobbying firm to edit the Wikipedia entry about its Stella Artois brand of lager to delete a negative reference to the brand. Portland Communications, a lobbying firm run by a former adviser to Tony Blair, deleted the term “wife-beater” from the Wikipedia article about Stella Artois, reportedly to “challenge any connections between the brand and domestic violence.”

      • Censorship

        • Dan Bull Raps About How Megaupload Takedown Screws Indie Artists Like Him

          If anyone in the US government actually bothered to understand how music is distributed, marketed and monetized today, they would have realized that Megaupload isn’t the problem — it’s one way to make things better for artists. But, as we know, the folks in the US government only get their information from the RIAA. So they end up making life much more difficult for indie artists by shutting down useful services for those artists. And, in the end, that is exactly what the RIAA wants.

          The DOJ justifies such losses by pointing to standard weasel wording in the MegaUpload contracts against liablity for loss or termination of contract. Bedsides ignoring lost revenue and reputation, the DOJ’s logic covers every computing device, especially non free software. The DOJ is not responsible for your losses if they smash your Windows laptop, for example, because Microsoft said you should keep a backup and could terminate your use of the computer at any time.

        • The Pirate Party of Catalunya is organizing lawsuits against the FBI for the damage it has done to users of Megaupload.

        • Big publishers make more outrageous demands for control and censorship.

          I wish no one was listening to them.

        • Powers of Ten Perspective on SOPA

          Congress is a flea pit. We can crack the fleas one at a time as they bite us, or we can clean house. … We win when we end this stream of Internet-breaking bills, and that will only happen when Congressional election campaigns are no longer paid for by monied interests. … Lessig has called it a “generational” problem: pernicious money will take 30 years to eradicate, so we may end up cleaning up the country for our children.

          It should not take that long to fix.

        • FBI Reminds Us Government Already Has MegaPower to Take Down Websites

          Even Cato understands some of the problems with SOPA and other insane US Copyright laws.

        • The Amazing Atheist on SOPA

          This is a government that passes laws to justify things they are already doing not really to give themselves permission to do them.

          He compares the NDAA to the indefinite detention of Bradly Manning and wonders if anyone would come to his rescue if he were jailed. It’s good to be angry about these things but that anger needs to be focused into something useful to bring about change.

        • It’s Time To Go On The Offensive For Freedom Of Speech

          The copyright industry is tenacious and effective in using the “Daddy, I want a pony” tactics in legislation. They go at it again, and again, and again, and again. The result is a continuous erosion of our civil rights and an entrenchment of their entitlement to taxpayer funds. … as long as we’re just defending, we will always be on the retreat, and we will always lose.

        • Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action

          In the wake of last week’s Megaupload shutdown, some of the biggest names in the market are taking drastic action. During the last 48 hours many sites have completely withdrawn their systems for paying uploaders when their files are shared with others, but one of the most dramatic moves came first from Filesonic and today Fileserve. Both services now forbid people from downloading any files they didn’t upload themselves.

        • The House of Saud and the Big Banks Move in on Twitter

          Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal joins JPMorgan Chase as a major stakeholder in Twitter, the social media network that catapulted both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement onto the global stage.

          This and other nasty things happened to OWS while most people were busy shopping. Censorship was reported almost immediately.

      • Privacy

        • Behavioral Pricing: A consumer’s worst nightmare, a merchant’s dream

          It’s a consumer’s worst nightmare as it uses the traces of your online identity to maximize prices on the products and services you want most. It’s also an ecommerce merchant’s dream.

          Think you have nothing to hide? That belief, and sites like Facebook and Twitter, will cost you. Don’t you just love customer loyalty programs?

        • Police Use of G.P.S. Is Ruled Unconstitutional

          Though the ruling was limited to physical intrusions, the opinions in the case collectively suggested that a majority of the justices are prepared to apply broad Fourth Amendment privacy principles unrelated to such intrusions to an array of modern technologies,

          I’ll believe that when I see it.

      • Civil Rights

        • Emanuel’s Protest-Squashing “Sit Down and Shut Up” Ordinance Passes in Chicago

          Critics say the “sit down and shut up” ordinance, as it has been called, seeks to chill protest and civil liberties in Chicago through measures including mandatory $1 million liability insurance for protests, a heightened police presence and more difficulty getting a permit.

          The measures are similar to those in Wisconsin and will effectively bar protest by poor people, those with the most grievances. Voter ID laws keep the same people from being able to vote.

        • When Should Open Source Be Written Into Law?

          Last August Karen Sandler … asked the manufacturer [of a defribulator that would be implanted in her] for the source code, and was denied. … she found that the FDA does not review or have access to the source code. She also found that she had no legal recourse against the manufacturer to force them to release their code. … the manufacturer ignored her Freedom Of Information Act request. Twice. … I would suggest three areas of software which should be available upon request, without question.

          The Open Source people are coming to grips with the notion that devices they don’t control are actually in control of them. They phrase it as a safety issue rather than a rights issue, but we should not let device makers have this kind of power over us. We must demand all of the software freedoms not just the ability to look at code and trust that’s what is running. In cases where certification is required and the code should not be changed, an verifiable escrow should be kept by the certifiying body. In cases like an automobile, software freedom is the only way to protect us from malice.

        • Park City Tragedy Underscores Tragedy of the U.S. Health Care System — for Both Canadians and Americans

          At just 29 years old, Burke was considered a top-flight “acrobat-on-skis,” and a medal contender at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. Instead, her family will be laying her to rest in her native Canada — and pleading for money to help cover the estimated $550,000 they owe for the medical care she received at University of Utah Hospital over nine days. The irony is that had the accident occurred in Canada, her family would not be facing having to come up with more than half a million dollars to pay for her care. Her care would have been covered because, unlike the U.S., Canada has a system of universal coverage.

        • The Teenager Who Changed My Life

          Anyone who believes that American doctors call the shots when it comes to providing medical care for their insured patients is sadly mistaken. Many folks, like Nataline’s parents, are stunned to discover — when they are helpless to do anything about it — that insurance companies essentially have the power to make what amount to life and death decisions. … A CIGNA medical director 2,500 miles away said he did not agree with Nataline’s doctors and felt the transplant would not be appropriate … pressure worked. CIGNA agreed to cover the transplant at an estimated cost of $250,000 on December 20, 2007 … She passed away just hours after CIGNA told the Sarkisyans they would pay for it.

        • Nationalist Jogging Event Mistaken for Gay Pride Rally and shut down.

        • Foxconn Boss Likens Workers to Animals

          This is not nearly as offensive as treating employees like animals.

      • Copyrights

        • Elsevier — my part in its downfall

          Once I did hear about Elsevier’s behaviour, I made a conscious decision not to publish in Elsevier journals and I started to feel bad about cooperating with them in any way. … I have decided that my previous quiet approach was not enough.

          A well informed opinion. Here’s a moral argument for the author: scolarship should not be limited by proximity to a library. We are all poorer when the next Einstein can’t learn physics.

        • Supreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public DomainSupreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain

          The key point in the case was questioning whether or not the US could take works out of the public domain and put them under copyright. The US had argued it needed to do this under a trade agreement to make other countries respect our copyrights. … The ruling is ridiculously depressing. The Justices basically just keep repeating the mantra they first set forth in Eldred, that as long as Congress says it’s okay — and that the “fair use” and the “idea/expression” dichotomy remain — all is just dandy.

          Corporations frequently turn to anti-democratic treaties that circumvent the entire legislative process.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/24/links-lots-of-censorship-and-astroturf-sopamegaupload-backlashes-bring-informed-opinion-into-the-political-process/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/21/off-topic-on-contrarian/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/21/off-topic-on-contrarian/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 02:14:36 +0000 Dr. Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/?p=57588 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.

    1. 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?
    2. 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.
    3. 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 20^th 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. █

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/21/off-topic-on-contrarian/feed/ 4 http://techrights.org/2012/01/21/links-megaupload-sopa-updates/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/21/links-megaupload-sopa-updates/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:25:45 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57553 Reader’s Picks

    Censorship

    • SOPA a controversy against the Open Source world

    • Busta Rhymes Backs Megaupload, Says Record Labels Are The Real Criminals

      Musicians say they were getting a better deal with MegaUpload and are angry the site was taken down.

    • Megaupload wasn’t just for pirates: angry users out of luck for now

      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.

    • How SOPA and PIPA Affect US Websites and Companies ~pj

      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.

    • This Internet Spring Could Lead to an Internet Awakening

      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.

    • Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood

      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.

    • RFS 9: Kill Hollywood

      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.

    ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/21/links-megaupload-sopa-updates/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/20/links-quick-sopapipa-update-hanford-uefi-and-apple-owns-your-work/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/20/links-quick-sopapipa-update-hanford-uefi-and-apple-owns-your-work/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:08:32 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57409 Reader’s Picks

    • Linux Foundation Report Shows Growing Linux Adoption Rates in the Enterprise

      Management is interfering less and techs at big businesses want their freedom and performance as much as anyone else.

    • Why UEFI secure boot is difficult for Linux

      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.

    • Hardware

      • The Ben NanoNote – The World’s Smallest Linux Laptop?

        It also happens to boast entirely open hardware and software, which not only makes it crazy small, but also Stallman-approved.

        Tiny laptop is tiny.

      • The rise and fall of personal computing

        What they mean is the rise and fall of Microsoft/x86, but the graphs are clear enough. Wintel had less than half of the personal computing market by the end of last year.

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • NYPD and Pentagon to place mobile scanners on the streets on NYC

        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.

      • The nationwide repression of mass protests in the US was accompanied by a nationwide attack on news reporters.

        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.

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • Problems plague cleanup at Hanford nuclear waste site

        several senior engineers cited design problems that could bring the plant’s operations to a halt before much of the waste is treated. Their reports have spurred new technical reviews and raised official concerns about the risk of a hydrogen explosion or uncontrolled nuclear reaction inside the plant. … “the design processes are cut short, the safety analyses are cut short, and the oversight is cut short. … We have to stop now and figure out how to do this right, before we move any further.”

        Criticality issues at this stage are shocking.

    • Finance

      • Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale

        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.

    • Censorship

      • SOPA Opera Update: Opposition Surges

        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.

      • With MegaUpload Down, Who’s Next? RapidShare? SoundCloud? DropBox?

        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?

      • Kim Dotcom explained the MegaUpload business model before he was arrested, From Rogue To Vogue: Megaupload and Kim Dotcom

        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.

      • EFF: No more back room deals — Users must have a voice in governing the Internet

        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.

      • Wikipedia shows traffic uptick during SOPA protest

        Some people predicted that the blackout would harm Wikipedia’s reputation. The opposite happened.

      • India OKs censoring Facebook, Google, Microsoft, YouTube

        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.

      • Senat postpones PIPA vote.

    • Internet/Net Neutrality

      • Battling Internet Censorship: The Long War

        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.

    • DRM

      • Most TV sets nowadays are actually computers designed to restrict their users.

    • Copyrights

      • Apple claims ownership of books written with their editor.

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/20/links-quick-sopapipa-update-hanford-uefi-and-apple-owns-your-work/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/19/apple-vs-appearance/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/19/apple-vs-appearance/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:30:42 +0000 Dr. Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/?p=57528 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. █

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/19/apple-vs-appearance/feed/ 4 http://techrights.org/2012/01/18/invitation-of-guest-articles/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/18/invitation-of-guest-articles/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:09:01 +0000 Dr. Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/?p=57464 Summary: Invitation of guest articles and an observation about posting pace

  A COUPLE of years ago this site produced a lot more posts, peaking at 29 posts in just one day. Today we have 16 posts ready, but due to the risk of information overload we decided to limit ourselves to a maximum of 10 posts per day. We are always interested in article contributions from readers. We have a PageRank 7 front page and can offer a lot of exposure to ideas, so those wishing to publish something, please contact us. █

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/18/invitation-of-guest-articles/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/18/sopa-decision/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/18/sopa-decision/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:55:17 +0000 Dr. Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/?p=57452 Summary: Explanation of the decision not to go off the air, despite some suggestions that we should do so

  THE BANNER at the top is our way of sending out the message other than the many links we post on a daily basis (many are about SOPA and PIPA). We decided that, given our focus on exposing threats to freedom, protesting censorship by self-censorship would beat the purpose. We greatly appreciate those who put down their site for a whole day and support this entirely .The banner at the top will stay up for quite a while (not just a day). Please sign this petition. █

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/18/sopa-decision/feed/ 2 http://techrights.org/2012/01/17/links-more-sopa-tv-whitespaces-under-attack/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/17/links-more-sopa-tv-whitespaces-under-attack/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:58:58 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57334 Reader’s Picks

  • Woz praises Android function, cries over iPhone decay.

    “I used to ask Siri, ‘What are the five biggest lakes in California?’ and it would come back with the answer,” he said. “Now it just misses. It gives me real estate listings….”

  • Censorship

    • Rupert Murdoch turns to Twitter to attack Obama [and Google]

      “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery” … continued with several tweets, attacking Google as the “Piracy leader” for streaming movies free. In later tweets he called Google a “great company.”

      It is interesting that a man who so tightly controls the opinion expressed by one of the largest media empires would go to Twitter to tell us what he really thinks.

    • MIT Media Lab: The Media Lab is against SOPA and PIPA

      You can read more about the issue on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog and my blog where we have cross-posted a longer post on the topic.

      I dissagree that, “the goal to try to minimize the dissemination of copyright materials online is laudable.” The dissemination of knowledge is good and this is ultimately why authors publish.

    • Fabian Scherschel of Linux Outlaws has a video message: A Message About SOPA

    • What is SOPA and how does it work? The Stop Online Piracy Act explained

    • House Kills SOPA

      In a surprise move today, Representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, effectively killing the bill.

    • SOPA Shelved, Wikipedia Joins Blackout Anyway

      Sadly, SOPA’s counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) will still be pushed forward, meaning we must remain vigilant. Despite all of this, Wikipedia has announced it will join the blackout coming Wednesday. … It was pretty clear for anyone with even a modicum of political sense that SOPA had simply accumulated too much of a negative connotation to be pushed through without repercussions.

      The pressure is working, keep it up. Techrights reports elsewhere that Smith promisses to continue work on SOPA

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Google works for unlicensed spectrum while others try to undo open access requirements and get another greedy, corrupt spectrum auction from TV white spaces at CES.

      [Google's Senior Policy Counsel Rick Whitt] said that at least a portion of TV broadcasters’ spectrum should be devoted to unlicensed use, “We want a couple of public beaches.

      The statements of Neil Fried, senior telecommunications counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, are particularly repulsive because FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski was there to discuss quickly adding broadband to Lifeline, a program to assure telecommunications for the poor. Open Spectrum can do that. Auctions will give us expensive access owned by incumbents known for spying on those who can afford their rates. Both the FCC and Congress are portrayed as wanting auctions but the FCC was lobbying for unlicensed spectrum. Even tech laggard Microsoft says they want unlicensed TV White spaces and has systems ready to use.

  • Copyrights

    • 22 Months in Jail for Streaming Video

  • Trademarks

    • Occupy Wall Street (TM)[2]

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/17/links-more-sopa-tv-whitespaces-under-attack/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/14/links-a-quick-sopa-update-they-dont-hear-you/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/14/links-a-quick-sopa-update-they-dont-hear-you/#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:09:37 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=57277 Reader’s Picks

  • A GNU/Linux user stranded at work with Windows

    You really don’t know how good something is until you don’t have it any longer. … I was working in two applications at once, so instinctively I went to move the second application to a different workspace… Only to realize I couldn’t. … I went to find a copy and paste manager, there wasn’t one installed. So naturally I sought out the package manager to install one… Wait, there isn’t a package manager? Comon – even the smart phones most people carry around have a “App Store” … The biggest annoyance I ran into (and someone please let me know if I can make Windows 7 do this)? alt+left click to move a window.

  • The Mystery of KDE Activities

  • Hardware

    • FSFE Android Resources

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Airport Screeners to be Monitored for Radiation, TSA Says

      The lack of monitoring is negligence.

  • Anti-Trust

    • FSLC: Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM devices

      At the beginning of December, we warned the Copyright Office that operating system vendors would use UEFI secure boot anticompetitively, by colluding with hardware partners to exclude alternative operating systems. As Glyn Moody points out, Microsoft has wasted no time in revising its Windows Hardware Certification Requirements to effectively ban most alternative operating systems on ARM-based devices that ship with Windows 8. … Between Microsoft’s new ARM secure boot policy and Qualcomm’s announcement, this worst-case scenario is beginning to look inevitable.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Israeli students paid $2,000 to use social media for pro-government messages

      How nice of them not to outsource it.

  • Censorship

    • Senator Schumer is in favor of censoring the Internet.

    • The Veto SOPA/PIPA petition exceeded 51,000 signatures.

      No need to stop now though. While there’s plenty of well-founded skepticism about the effectiveness of the White House petition site, being able to point to a petition that has more signatures than pretty much any other petition on the site is a handy proof that the opposition to this amazingly ill-conceived legislation extends far wider than just a few self-interested Californian executives.

      Please go sign it if you have not.

    • PIPA’s Own Sponsors Backing Off Bill; Ask Senate To Hold Off On Voting

      Harry Reid apparently cannot hear you. He has come out with a statement saying that the cloture vote will continue on January 24th, despite the concerns of so many Senators (even co-sponsors of the bill) because it’s “too important to delay.”

    • Obama did not hear you: The White House issues a disappointing response to the Veto SOPA petition.

      the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response. We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values. … We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.

      Written by the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator,” the president promises censorship instead of a veto and encourages private industry to get busy before legislation is passed.

    • Indian Judge Tells Google And Facebook To ‘Check And Remove Objectionable Material’ Or Be Blocked

    • German Court: ISP Must Not Block Access To Foreign Sites, Even If They Are Illegal

      A rare good example as others try all means of censorship.

• Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers

• UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed

  I didn’t have any specific proof that Microsoft was behind this shameful U-turn, but Mark Ballard has, it seems: “The British government withdrew its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft, it has been revealed in a Cabinet Office brief leaked to Computer Weekly.”

• In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors.

  one of the advantages of the transition to a “magnet site” is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. … all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links

• How Not to Ace a Google Interview

  Are you a software engineer? Do you want to work at Google? If so, ignore this WSJ article, and ignore the book it comes from, titled “Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?”

• Mike Elgan Google+ Diet update.

  That’s still using Facebook, but for some people it’s an acceptable middle ground. And at least you don’t actually have to go to facebook.com, see all the app spam, junk and other stuff you don’t want to see.

  Advice on how to get out of Facebook and pull your friends to G+.

• Hardware

  • One Laptop per Child To Unveil XO 3.0 Tablet At CES

    The XO 3.0 features Marvell’s Armada PXA618 SOC processor and Avastar Wi-Fi SOC, with 512MB of RAM. It can run Android and other Linux operating systems like Fedora. … The tablet will be priced at $100 or less

    All sorts of wonderful tablets are on the way but OLPC has traditionally been free software friendly.

  • ZDNet’s version of Software Freedom and Android

    The author of this article is making things look worse than they are. He uses Windows and a variety of dubious software to exercise some trivial control over his Android phone. There’s nothing wrong with the author’s goals but non free tools may betray him later. Things should be much easier than that and is for reasonable devices and host OS. His device may be nastier and should be avoided if it is.

    The situation reminds me of the x86 world ten years ago, where a person had to be a little more careful before buying a computer or device. I saved myself all sorts of trouble by abandoning non free software then. Then, as now, “experts” and the Windows press said that free software was too difficult and not for ordinary users.

  • One Tablet Per Child, Non-Profit Now Says

    OLPC’s hardware has been distinguished in part by an unusual display from Pixel Qi that is designed to be read in bright sunlight. Models of the new tablet with that screen are expected to cost more than $100.

  • Marvell and One Laptop per Child Unveil the XO 3.0 Tablet

    Built on Marvell’s Armada PXA618 SOC processor and Avastar Wi-Fi SOC, with 512MB of RAM, the 8-inch XO 3.0 tablet is purported to be very thin and boasts some rather unique charging circuitry, being the only tablet able to draw charge directly from solar panels, hand cranks and other alternative power sources. OLPC has said the two-watt system is even capable of 10 minutes of runtime from just one minute of hand cranking.
    The tablet can be configured to sport either a standard LCD or Pixel Qi sunlight-readable display at 1024 x 768-resolution and can run either the Android or OLPC’s Sugar Linux operating system, built specifically for children.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • TSA screenings aren’t just for airports anymore

    The TSA’s 25 “viper” teams — for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response — have run more than 9,300 unannounced checkpoints and other search operations in the last year. Department of Homeland Security officials have asked Congress for funding to add 12 more teams next year. According to budget documents, the department spent $110 million in fiscal 2011 for “surface transportation security,” including the TSA’s viper program, and is asking for an additional $24 million next year.

    As predicted, the loss of rights at airports is translated. They gave themselves technical justification by declaring a jurisdiction perimeter around “ports” that encompasses 80% of the US population.

  • Weapons Sales to Iraq Move Ahead Despite US Worries.

  • Mossad chief: Iranian nuclear weapons do not threaten Israel’s survival.

  • Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta: Iran Not Building a Nuclear Weapon
    

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • [14,000] U.S. excess deaths linked to Fukushima

    Study authors epidemiologist Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, and Dr. Janette Sherman, an adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, said six days after the nuclear reactor meltdowns struck four reactors at Fukushima March 11, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over American shores. … Mangano said the normal level of Iodine-131 in U.S. precipitation was about 2 picocuries Iodine-131 per liter of water, but the highest detected levels of Iodine-131 in precipitation were: Boise, Idaho, 390; Kansas City, 200; Salt Lake City, 190; Jacksonville, Fla., 150; Olympia, Wash., 125; and Boston, 92.

    After passing on warnings here, I switched my family to UHTP milk and stayed there for months. The US said everything was safe, raised acceptable levels for milk and rainwater then quit monitoring.

  • A whistleblower who worked on the smaller existing Keystone pipeline says that Bechtel and Transcanda cut costs at the expense of safety — and it shows, in oil spills.

• Finance

  • How Romney’s Firm Drove Steel Plant Into Bankruptcy, But Still Profited Thanks To Federal Bailout

    Romney’s real world experience includes making millions from federal bailouts and running firms in to bankrupcy anyway. His retirement from this work still pays him millions of dollars while the people who used to do the work got shafted.

  • Simon Lack shows us that there is no honor among the frauds on Wall Street

    from 1998 to 2010, 84% of the investment gains of the entire hedge fund industry went to the managers, and only 16% to the investors. The thievery of our “financial industry” beggars the mind. Never mind the 1%! This is a tiny fraction of the 1% fleecing the rest of the 1%.

    Move Your Money away from these crooks.

• Anti-Trust

  • Kindle Fire Review: Decent Tablet Despite Sacrifices

    While we’re on the subject of “too small,” let’s talk about the Fire’s memory. It has 8 gigabytes of storage. That’s enough for more books than you’ll ever read, but ten movies will eat up the whole thing. The cheapest iPad, which costs $499, has twice as much memory. The Nook Color, which costs $199, also has 8 gigabytes, but it comes with a slot for memory expansion with cheap cards. I don’t understand why the Fire doesn’t have a slot like that. The very first Kindle did. There’s no step-up model of the Fire with more memory.

    PJ asked some questions Fox News should have, “The logical question is why — did the patent license agreement Amazon signed to get Microsoft to go away include the kinds of hardware and software restrictions that Barnes & Noble has now revealed Microsoft unsuccessfully demanded of them as conditions to get a license to its patents? Barnes & Noble calls the demands in effect a ‘veto power’ over Android’s features. Barnes and Noble wrote: ‘Indeed, the proposed license would have severely limited and, in some cases, entirely eliminated Barnes & Noble’s ability to upgrade or improve the Nook or Nook Color, even though Microsoft’s asserted patents have nothing to do with such improvements.’ It’s the right question, I think, then regarding the Kindle Fire’s limitations.”

  • Nook Tablet review: Great hardware, stiff competition

    The B&N Nook Tablet, successor to the underground hit Nook Color, is a terrific tablet, with a vibrant screen, a speedy CPU and a nice offering of books and other media. If you buy it, especially for reading, or streaming from your Netflix video or Pandora music accounts, you’ll likely be quite happy. For $250, it’s hard to find a nicer media-focused 7-inch Android tablet

    It’s funny how MSNBC colored in advance the failure of Nook Microsoft would like due to “competition” and inability to “cozy up to” big movie and music publishers.

  • Barnes and Noble Has Shipped One Million Nook Tablets, Industry Report States

    But the sub-iPad tablet market is largely untapped and the impressive initial sales numbers show consumers want a $200-ish tablet. For example, if this report is correct (it seems very likely), B&N shipped a million tablets in roughly a month while CE giant Asus is predicting to ship just 1.8 million tablets for all of 2011. The iPad has effectively already won the first several rounds of the tablet war. But much like the PC battlefield, there is plenty of room for more than just one vendor. Barnes & Noble is officially a top player.

  • Nook Color gets new streaming content

    This is an example of a feature upgrade on an older device.

  • Amazon Selling ‘Well Over’ 1 Million Kindle Devices Per Week

    “Kindle Fire is the most successful product we’ve ever launched-it’s the bestselling product across all of Amazon for 11 straight weeks, we’ve already sold millions of units, and we’re building millions more to meet the high demand,” said Dave Limp, vice president of Amazon Kindle. “In fact, demand is accelerating-Kindle Fire sales increased week over week for each of the past three weeks.

    The $50 price and a few other things sold Fire to people I know. The update mentioned is supposed to make it hard to liberate the device, but it was soon rooted again. PJ adds: I got to play with one over the holidays, and it was lovely. A bit heavy, compared to the Nook, and personally I support the Nook because I don’t want my money going to Microsoft for their stupid patents, and Amazon signed a patent license agreement with Microsoft rather than fight back, and Nook is fighting instead, so I’m a Nook girl, myself. I prefer it to the iPad, actually, because I can take it with me everywhere. But the Kindle Fire is a good product, and I have to say I didn’t notice any of the issues I read about that Jacob Nielsen complained about. He has strong persona views which I don’t share, so I have some questions about all that. It seems any time a wonderful new product comes out, it gets slammed in the media [Techrights: the Microsoft media, unless it's a Microsoft device but then it would suck and be hyped.] The Kindle Fire does what it says it will do for you, and it is great for watching movies, as well as for reading. I can see why people are buying it. Both the Nook and the Kindle Fire are, of course, Android devices. – Update: Sorry for the typo, which I have just fixed. It’s Amazon that signed the agreement, not Android, of course.

  • Barnes and Noble may spin off Nook e-reader

    Barnes & Noble is considering spinning off its Nook business, the company said Thursday in an announcement that sent investors reeling. “We see substantial value in what we’ve built with our Nook business in only two years,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a prepared statement. “We believe it’s the right time to investigate our options to unlock that value.”

    The WSJ/FoxNews said that losses were expected but that’s hard to imagine after selling millions of devices.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Lockheed Martin goes to bat for oppressive regime

    A top executive at Lockheed Martin recently worked with lobbyists for Bahrain to place an Op-Ed defending the nation’s embattled regime in the Washington Times — but the newspaper did not reveal the role of the regime’s lobbyists to its readers.

• Censorship

  • Urgent: Sign the petition for a veto of SOPA and PIPA

  • Lawmakers seem intent on approving SOPA, PIPA

    The U.S. Senate is expected to begin floor debate on PIPA shortly after senators return to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, and supporters appear to have the votes to override a threatened filibuster by Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, and a handful of other lawmakers.

    They do so over a massive public outcry and against the best technical and legal advice.

  • Petition via RMS: Tell Google: Quit the Chamber of Commerce

    whether it’s shilling for Big Oil or the tobacco companies or media giants, the Chamber is the poster child for how wealthy corporate money corrupts our system of government.

    I’m surprised to learn Google is a member. They should have quit after the HB Garry emails were published.

  • Obscenity law in doubt after jury acquits distributor of gay pornography

    the Obscene Publications Act, which came into force in 1959, appears to be on its last legs. … a London jury rejected prosecution claims that gay pornography depicting acts that are legal between consenting adults were capable of “depraving and corrupting” those who watched them on DVDs. … [the case] comes amid growing concern that Britain’s obscenity laws, which have multiplied in recent years with new laws on the possession of “extreme pornography”, are contradictory, ill-defined and illogical.

  • United States of Indefinite Detention

    © Coleen Monroe and Reverse Retrograde, 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material including text, photography, and design without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Coleen Monroe and Reverse Retrograde with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

    Even copyright maximalists are concerned about SOPA and NDAA. The essay is worth reading but I thought it would be better to comply with the copyright notice than quote it.

  • A new “anti-terrorism” law in Argentina could be used against protesters.

• Civil Rights

  • Greenwald: Three myths about the detention bill

    White-House-allied groups are now trying to ride to the rescue with attacks on the ACLU and dismissive belittling of the bill’s dangers. … it is very worthwhile to briefly examine — and debunk — the three principal myths being spread by supporters of this bill, and to do so very simply: by citing the relevant provisions of the bill, as well as the relevant passages of the original 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF),

    The damage control continues so it is still worth citing, even though the law was passed.

  • Child labor in Chinese coal mines.

    Coal powers China’s exports.

  • The streets of 2012

    The answers are alarming, but quite predictable: We are likely to see much greater centralisation of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. But we are also likely to see significant grassroots reaction. … All over the world, the pushback against protest looks similar, suggesting that state and corporate actors are learning “best practices” for repressing dissent while maintaining democratic facades. … [people use social media] in ways that indicate that they have little interest in being cordoned off into conflicting and competing ethnicities, nationalities, or religious identities. Overwhelmingly, they want simple democracy and economic self-determination.

  • Why growing up as an American female has left me wary of men

    There are big events that linger always and smaller ones that just accumulate, like the many many cars that have slowed down to keep pace with my walking down the street, while a strange man croons at me or whistles or calls out. In the aggregate, though, they lead to four-plus decades of experience as an American female.

  • Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

    This is a chilling little speech by Jesselyn Radick, a Bush administration whistleblower who was harassed aggressively by the Department of Justice, on how matters have gotten much worse for government whistleblowers under Obama, both in numbers and the ferocity of the retaliation.

    It is not fair to blame Obama alone. Beer and other alcohol are bad for you.

  • Legislators Are Out to Take Over Their State Judiciary Systems

    Florida is just one of dozens of states where legislators have attempted to seize control of the justice system to varying degrees. … in the wake of another decision that didn’t go their way, Republican legislators in Florida attempted to ram through a broad package of restrictions on the state’s judiciary last spring. The legislators tried unsuccessfully to emulate Texas and Oklahoma by splitting the Florida Supreme Court into civil and criminal divisions. They also tried to cut the state bar out of the judicial nominating process.

  • Indiana Workers Fight Back Against Assault on Unions and the ALEC Agenda

  • The ACLU is suing to overturn the Wisconsin voter ID law.

    Voter ID laws are a favorite Republican tactic for stopping poor people, old people, students, and minority group members from voting.

• German cities following Munich’s open source example

  Munich’s IT department in late December posted an update on the city’s migration to a complete open source-based desktop system. It wrote that on 12 December it had migrated 9,000 systems over to Linux, five hundred more than expected. Nearly all copies of a proprietary office suites are uninstalled

• 10 Reasons to Switch to Linux in 2012

  This is not a bad article but I wonder if there’s an editorial policy against mentioning GNU and software freedom when I read articles talking about the benefits of software freedom and gnu/linux without seeing those words.

  >

• Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

  The Open Source crowd is starting to understand the problem. Cori Doctorow sees the copyright battle as a prelude to the war on general purpose computing, transcript here, but sadly sees the language of the FSF as tedious.

• Diebold Virtualizes ATMs To Secure Banking Data

  VMware. I’m not sure they will dump Windows or just move it all to one place where it can be watched more carefully but the company seems to have finally learned that XP is not a good system to have in an automatic bank.

• Hardware

  • How a Montreal company won the race to build the world’s cheapest tablet

    This is an inspiring story about how a team of talented immigrants at a small company in Montreal tweaked Linux/Android to satisfy what others considered an impossibly low price requirement and win a contract that will grow to 100 million units.

• Security

  • New Year’s nightmare: Brawls erupt among hotel revellers after electronic keys stop working at the stroke of midnight

    Denver police say they were called to the hotel as fights broke out among frustrated guests. Local KUSA-TV some revellers got sick in the hallways and the elevators were not working at the Denver Tech Center Marriott.

    Microsoft is a safe bet for blame when a major Microsoft partner is involved and none of the stories mention software by name.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Blackwater 3.0: Rebranded ‘Academi’ Wants Back In Iraq

  • ICE [US Customs] Mistakenly Deports Missing Teen To Colombia

    The girl has been in jail for a year.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • If you can believe Tepco: Fukushima is in cold shutdown, says Japanese prime minister

  • Gravelines 1 shut down for crack repair

    Inspection work has revealed tiny cracks on a penetration at the bottom of Gravelines 1′s reactor pressure vessel. … similar faults were dealt with in 2003 at the South Texas Project site in the USA. … EDF has been requested by the ASN to check all its 900 MWe and 1300 MWe reactors for similar cracks – a total of 54 units.

  • An undersea drilling operation by Chevron in Brazil has been leaking for more than a month.

  • Obama Memo: Redeem Yourself With Rail

    The 2005-2008 period sent another stern warning that a discretionary, oil-based lifestyle was unlikely to be sustainable in America. … the Obama Administration could have easily used the financial crisis to start rebuilding our rail system: securing for itself a win-win in both job creation, and, a lessening of the economy’s energy intensity.

    With sobering energy cost statistics, a map of rail abandonment and plans for efficient rail revival.

  • Who Has Authority To Regulate of Genetically Modified Animals? It’s Complicated.

    US regulation of transgentic animals is confusing and inadequate. The widespread use of toxic corn in the US shows that regulation is also unable to protect public health.

• Finance

  • Apple May Hurt Shareholders With Patent War

    Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple (AAPL) Inc., told his biographer that he’d rather wage “thermonuclear war” with Google Inc. than make deals to share its technology with the maker of the Android operating system. … as rulings start coming in, it might be time for a détente that helps Apple maximize the value of its patents, said Kevin Rivette, a managing partner at 3LP Advisors LLC, a firm that advises on intellectual property.

    Fat chance. Apple’s burnt it’s bridge with suppliers who will now do what they can to get loose.

• Anti-Trust

  • Microsoft uses Nokia money to advertise Winphone and bribe the salesforce.

    [$200 million will be spent] Thurrott notes that “on AT&T at least, Nokia is outspending Microsoft 2-to-1.” … the plan includes a per-unit sales incentive for retail employees that sell a Windows Phone handset.

    Microsoft friendly articles are disgusting.

• Censorship

  • 
    EA, Nintendo, Sony reduce SOPA support by 50%

    Although their individual express support of the bill has been removed, these companies still back it by virtue of their association with the ESA.

    Just like Microsoft and GoDaddy, they are only sorry that people noticed.

  • How the US pressured Spain to adopt unpopular Web blocking law

  • Censoring flu virus research to keep the information out of the hands of terrorists is likely to do more harm than good, because the biggest danger comes from nature.

  • It is now illegal to access any foreign website in the Republic of Belarus

  • Bangladesh man given jail term for PM Hasina Facebook post

    There was alscontempt of court but no one should be dragged to court for what was allegedly said.

• Privacy

  • Facebook Has Become Useless

    I had 20 “groups” I placed people in, one for each security setting Facebook allowed me to specify as “custom”. I controlled who could see my wall, who could write on it, who could see my friends list, who could see where I worked, specific photo albums, etc. Employers versus family versus friends versus fans versus strangers — trust relationships. Then Facebook “simplified” security and suddenly a lot of people I friended who were controlled casual relationships suddenly had access to a bunch of personal information I didn’t want them to see.

    Less obvious violations of privacy are more menacing still.

• Civil Rights

  • Two former four star Marine generals denounce NDAA and urge a veto.

    IN his inaugural address, President Obama called on us to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” We agree. Now, to protect both, he must veto the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is expected to pass this week.

    NDAA is now law.

  • Former FBI agent,
    

    All I Want for Christmas Is My Civil Liberties!

  • Clinton’s “welfare reform” is now causing the disaster that progressives predicted at the time.

    The disaster did not happen right away, because there were plenty of jobs in the late 1990s.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • New law requires all restaurants in Malaysian city to provide Wi-Fi

• Copyrights

  • Public Domain Day: January 1, 2012

    What is entering the public domain in the United States? Nothing. Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year, or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. And wherever in the world you live, you will likely have to wait a very long time for anything to reach the public domain.

  • Rick Falkvinge: It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly

    I sometimes hear the old guard say that there would be no culture if there was no copyright monopoly. That is an outrageous insult to creators all over the world today. We create not because of a monopoly, but because of who we are; we have created and shared culture since we learned to put red paint on the inside of cave walls. … I reject and oppose this monopoly that was never for the creators, but always for the distributors: a guild whose time is up and obsolete, and which has no business trampling on our civil liberties.

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/07/links-an-unhappy-new-year-at-the-marriott-microsoft-set-backs-gnulinux-and-free-software-advances/feed/ 0 http://techrights.org/2012/01/04/techrights-after-novell/ http://techrights.org/2012/01/04/techrights-after-novell/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:41:31 +0000 Dr. Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/?p=57067

  Summary: A quick overview of topics we shall concentrate on at Techrights

  Now begins the year of no Novell, which was sold in 2011. The year 2012 will see our daily links expanded, probably to accommodate more news of relevance to our scope. It will also put a lot of emphasis on patents because readers reaffirmed this focus. We are going to look at how patents affect Free software and highlight players that work to the detriment of digital freedom, not just fair competition.

  Digital and legal foundation define the extent to which people can communicate, what they can communicate, and when they are permitted communication. In this age of protests and riots are see an ever-increasing crackdown on freedom of speech, right to organise, etc. The frameworks for communications are mostly proprietary (even if built on top of a Free stack) and this ought to change in order to defend people from unjust power. Software is only part of the problem because knowledge, spectrum, etc. can help or defy freedom. Maybe it will take a few more years for the majority of people to realise this. █

  ]]> http://techrights.org/2012/01/04/techrights-after-novell/feed/ 1 http://techrights.org/2011/12/28/links-microsoft-big-publishers-in-decline-and-fools-keep-pushing-for-sopa/ http://techrights.org/2011/12/28/links-microsoft-big-publishers-in-decline-and-fools-keep-pushing-for-sopa/#comments Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:10:13 +0000 Guest Editorial Team http://techrights.org/?p=56689 Reader’s Picks

  • Android Approved By Pentagon For DoD Usage, Major Setback For iPhone

    This article makes some great points but only software freedom will guard the user against Malware and there might not be any US cell phones that are free. It goes without saying that Blackberry should not be used either.

  • American corporate software can no longer be trusted for anything

    The discussions around SOPA have shown a very unfortunate side of United States policymaking — that its policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy. … Free software is not a matter of money anymore, if it ever was. It’s a matter of freedom and sovereignty.

    No one should trust non free software but idiotic US laws can ruin intentional trust in US made free software as well. Free software has always been about sovereignty but the non free software companies have been more abusive and obvious lately and people are noticing. The USA Patriot act is a similar liability for US service providers. The author even doubts Android.

    Techrights covered US government abuse of trade policy for Microsoft’s benefit in leaked diplomatic cables. This should outrage other US software companies such as Red Hat, IBM and Google.

  • Debian GNU/Linux Testing

    The next release of Debian GNU/Linux is shaping up beautifully. … At the rate they are going, Wheezy could be released before “8″.

  • Google market cap is set to pass Microsoft’s soon.

  • Hardware

    • Android drivers to be sucked back into Linux kernel.

      Greg Kroah-Hartman himself will include the Android drivers into his development branch for the upcoming Linux kernel 3.3, making it boot on Android devices without being patched.

  • Anti-Trust

    • Microsoft monopoly in retreat everywhere:
      

      Walmart Sells Linux Online

      This marks the return of desktop gnu/linux to Walmart. Microsoft had bullied every piece of the supply chain back in 2006 to remove this competition and pulled similar tricks against netbooks everywhere. Back in April, GNU/Linux came back to Walmart as a tablet in April. Other stores, like Best Buy, are trying to sell $1,000 Windows laptops as if it were 1995 again.

    • Amazon messes with Android

      Just days ago we reported and confirmed that Amazon’s Kindle Fire prevented owners from visiting the Android Market in the Silk browser. The 7-inch tablet reportedly contains a hidden utility app called “MarketIntentProxy.apk” which can detect when the end-user is hunting for an app, and will force a re-direct to the Amazon Appstore installed on the device — literally hijacking the browser. Now days later, Kindle Fire customers are reporting that they suddenly have access to the Android Market via the Silk browser.

      No matter how good software is, the owners have unjust power over you if you are not using free software. When you do have software freedom, you need to be careful to use a good, community curated distribution. Companies with ties to big publishers will sell you out.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • People in Glasshouses (With Windows) Shouldn’t Throw Stones

      Microsoft’s call for “droidrage” stories on Android comes across not just as a rather feeble attempt to divert people’s attention from Windows Phone’s abysmal showing in the smartphone market, but also as deeply hypocritical: if there is any platform that deserves a “rage” tag, it’s Windows, thanks to the tens of billions of dollars of harm it has inflicted on its users

      Most people love their Android phones and tablets, so Microsoft will have to write the rage stories themselves.

  • Censorship

    • Microsoft’s shameful, continued support of SOPA

    • Harvard Researchers Explain That SOPA Supporters Are Misusing Their Research To Support SOPA

      Our research offers the depressing conclusion that comparatively few users are seeking blocked political information and suggests that the governments most successful in blocking political content ensure that entertainment and social media content is widely available online precisely because users get much more upset about blocking the ability watch movies than they do about blocking specific pieces of political content. … in addition to mandating DNS filtering, SOPA would make many circumvention tools illegal. The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism.

    • An interesting video on how big publishers used P2P services to push their “lame” TV shows and music and then used the sharing for propaganda purposes to gain more power over internet based competition.

      Forbes dismisses the thesis by intentionally misunderstanding it. The “internet radio” story and the shutdown of competitors like mp3.com show that goal of the war against sharing has always been control of competition. Anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and Tivized hardware show that big publishers demand complete control of all computers as well as the internet. It is hard for me to imagine the Forbes author being unaware of these efforts.

  • Why “Safe Harbor” Laws Are Disastrous For Free Speech

    the “safe harbor” provisions have gradually shifted the environment to suppress free speech and expression in favor of the suppressing industries: the copyright industries. … The DMCA was, and is, an abomination. So is the habit of letting corporations guard our right to free speech. It must be unconditional, and it isn’t when there is any kind of intermediary liability. … corporations would rather err on the side of caution, preferring to throw a thousand users to the wolves in error than becoming liable for one shielded in error.

  • The lawmakers who brought you SOPA and other censorship bills

    anyone running against these folks would be missing out on a huge opportunity not to make the incumbent’s support of censoring the internet into a campaign issue.

    Many of the names are familiar from other legislative disasters.

  • The GoDaddy boycott was effective, so people should boycott other companies too.

    GoDaddy capitulating is a huge win, because it’s the first stone to come out of the wall. Now that GoDaddy has demonstrated that they were taking too much damage to continue with their support of SOPA, it empowers people to exert similar pressure on other companies, and it demonstrates to those companies that there are enough angry people out there that you need to listen up and pay attention.

    Keep migrating your domains and avoid things from the other bullies who would waste your money ruining the internet to preserve their position in the world.

  • Civil Rights

    • OWS Fights Back Against Police Surveillance by Launching “Occucopter” Citizen Drone

      police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and “frozen zones”. This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering. Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • People say a lot of ill-informed things about Chrome, and mostly they don’t deserve a response, but …

      It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. … Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. … the whole “You’re funding a competitor!!!” angle is misguided. Google is funding a partner.

Summary: SCO’s gift to Microsoft or simply an innocent coincidence

LAST night in IRC we discussed SCO and it turned out that their homepage now endorses and advertises Microsoft’s hype V, not System V. Several years ago Bruce Perens wrote that “Eric Raymond revealed a leaked email from SCO’s strategic consultant Mike Anderer to their management. The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.” █

• Cory Doctorow: My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven

• Building your own supercomputer using Ubuntu and Kerrighed:

  The following page describes how to build your very own supercomputer using household-type easily available parts and tying them all together using Kerrighed, a Single System Image operating system for clusters.

• Science

  • Microsoft Kicke off CES Keynote Stage

    I’m surprised they were ivited back after last year’s embarrassment.

• Hardware

  • The Future of Academic Research

    When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research. [not] bookstores, telecommunications, matchmaking services, newspapers, pornography, stock trading, music distribution, or a great many other industries… And yet it has not.

• Security

  • Pogson: M$ Attacks Slated

    Slated.org has a post about finding a cross-site scripting attack from M$’s network. I checked my log, too.

  • The Sovereign Keys Project

    Sovereign Keys will protect HTTPS and other uses of TLS/SSL against a wide variety of attacks, including attacks involving Certificate Authorities and domain validation, and attacks that involve downgrading or blocking encrypted connections. It operates by providing an optional and very secure way of associating domain names with public keys …

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • FBI Says Activists Who Investigate Factory Farms Can Be Prosecuted as Terrorists

  • The US said it will attack Iran if it tries to build a nuclear weapon.

  • The CIA drone attacks in Pakistan have killed 60 people since September. The Obama regime has covered up the identities of 59 of them, as well as all other relevant information.

• Cablegate

  • The prosecutors in Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing were unable to present evidence that Manning had hurt US national security.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Breakthrough could double solar energy output

    much of the energy delivered by sunlight comes in the form of “hot” electrons, which are too high-energy to be converted to electricity in silicon and are instead lost as heat. For that reason, the max insolation-to-electricity efficiency of a silicon solar cell used today is considered to be about 31%. … Zhu’s process involves absorbing the photon of sunlight in a plastic – in his experiments, pentacene – to produce a dark quantum “shadow state” from which two electrons can be retrieved, instead of just one. … Right now, his experiments use ordinary sunlight, and not focused sunlight, and he’s getting 44% efficiency.

  • What the Frack? Hydraulic Fracturing Companies Exempt from Public Health Laws

    the “Halliburton Loophole” and exempts hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) practices from regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act. This circumventing of integral public health legislation gets its name from the man who inserted the exemption into the bill—then-Vice President Dick Cheney

  • The FDA abandoned a plan to block the practice of giving farm animals small amounts of antibiotics.

    Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died in recent decades from the infections that cannot be treated because of the resistance stimulated by that practice. Clearly this is the work of agribusiness and pharmaceutical companies, and shows how many Americans they are prepared to kill to avoid a decrease in income. But the real scandal is that our governmental system allows them to do this.

  • Clinton is threatening economic warfare to stop an EU plan to make airlines pay for their carbon emissions.

  • Japanese mothers rise up against nuclear power

    Experts view the ongoing protests as a landmark in Japan’s fledgling social movements long consigned to the sidelines of a prosperous and hardworking society that puts a premium on achievement and success. “The ongoing demonstrations symbolise the determination of ordinary people who do not want nuclear power because it is dangerous. There is also the bigger message that we do not trust the government any more,” said Takanobu Kobayashi, who manages the Matsudo network of citizens’ movements.

  • 2011 broke records for many kinds of weather disasters.

  • US citizens: thank Obama for the new EPA regulations on toxic mercury emissions.

  • Selling toxic sewage sludge under the name of “biosolids”.

    The Water Environment Federation (WEF), the sewage sludge industry trade group that invented the Orwellian PR euphemism “biosolids” for toxic sludge in 1991, is now “rebranding” sewage treatment plants as “water resource recovery facilities.” … A 2008 study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that the toxins in sludge end up in food from livestock grazing on sludge-contaminated land.

• Finance

  • A Christmas Message From America’s Rich

    You have to have skin in the game … If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up.

  • Occupy Wall Street comes home to roost with Congo’s ‘debt vultures’

    A “vulture” is a financial speculator who, as we recently reported, gets his hands on debts owed by desperately poor nations. The Brooklyn “vulture” targeted by OWS and Friends of the Congo is Peter Grossman. Two weeks ago, the Guardian exposed him as a financier who is demanding the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world’s poorest nation, pay $100m to the hedge fund he manages, FG Hemisphere. … The 1% must be dismayed to learn that eviction does not end conviction.

    This article is the subject of a legal complaint from Peter Grossman.

  • 
    UK Uncut will sue the government for its sweetheart tax deal with Goldman Sachs.

  • Corruption in Birmingham, Alabama, has driven up water and sewer rates to the point where many poor people are being cut off.

• Anti-Trust

  • Nokia’s Windows phones are market failures.

  • Fusion Garage Vanishes

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Why are Britain’s great art houses in bed with Big Oil?

    Were the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor to curate a History of the World in 100 Lost Objects, object No 1 might be all the taxes from Big Oil we never received, along with the hole in the national finances created by all the corporate welfare they have claimed. If we had those taxes then we would not need to have grandiose PR philanthropy to pay for our art galleries and museums. That said, if BP is garnering all this publicity for giving the Tate half a million quid a year, then that is a small fraction of the – what is it? – 60 million quid the Tate gets from us. So to talk about the collapse of the arts without the sugar daddy is disingenuous. … Big business sponsorship narrows the spectrum of human imagination in many subtle ways.

• Censorship

  • The List Of Internet Censoring Countries The MPAA Thinks Provide A Good Example For The US

    Yes, it’s a sort of a who’s who of the most repressive regimes on the planet.

  • Lawsuit challenges animal enterprise terror law as unconstitutional

    Like many “terrorism” laws, this one was vague enough to turn free speech into terrorism. The purpose was to silence and jail corporate critics.

  • Censorship and turmoil in Egypt

    Eleven people were killed by brutal policemen in Egypt. A lesser tragedy is the loss of 200,000 books in a library built by Napoleon to hold the country’s finest. It is doubtful that the works had been scanned and shared, so many one of a kind works are surely lost.

  • Twitter suspiciously suspends a journalist account.

    Looks like my Twitter account wasn’t the only one suspended without warning for covering #NDAA and #OWS.

  • Facebook censors a critic.

    No surprise there.

  • Veoh Still Perfectly Legal… But Also Still Dead Due To Bogus Copyright Lawsuit

    this should be a huge warning sign for why SOPA/PIPA would be a disaster. Just look at the status of Veoh today. It’s out of business due to a totally bogus DMCA claim that forced it into court. At least under the DMCA, it was able to keep its site up. SOPA/PIPA set up a system whereby sites don’t just have to defend themselves in court after they’ve already been shut down, but they can’t even keep their business going at all while the process is ongoing. Given situations like Veoh and the Dajaz1 takedown, it should be quite obvious that copyright holders have a long history of killing off perfectly legal services by abusing copyright law.

  • Gibson Guitar & Others On SOPA Supporters List Say They Never Supported The Bill

    A funny thing, no one wants to be responsible for the bill they spent so much money purchasing.

  • “Go Daddy” Publicly Reverses on SOPA: But They’re Still Slime

  • Turkey has arrested over 25 journalists for their writing.

  • Censorship

    Imprisoning people for what they say is tyranny, but freedom of speech is threatened around the world in supposedly “free” countries. In the US, investigating and criticizing agribusiness is called “terrorism” and punished by imprisonment. In the UK, speaking “racist insults” is punished by imprisonment. In France, some opinions about 20th century history will be punished by imprisonment. In India, books are banned; Taslima Nasrin’s book “Shame”, about oppression of Hindus in Bangladesh, was banned in West Bengal — and now ideas distasteful to any major religion are likely to be banned too.

• Privacy

  • Cybersecurity bill promotes exchange of data; critics say measure could harm privacy rights

    “They’re just going to blow a hole through all the privacy laws on the books for cybersecurity purposes,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The concern is that the government will be able to create records of people’s Internet use in the name of cybersecurity.”

  • EFF: Analyzing Carrier IQ Profiles

    The EFF wants to learn what the carriers meant to collect and will present the result to regulators. If you have a rooted/jailbroken phone, and can find a Profile on it, please send 1) a copy of the Profile, 2) which phone and network it was from, and 3) where on the phone’s file system you found it. You can email iqiq@eff.org or put it in a git remote they can pull from.

• Education Watch

  • Madness: Even School Children Are Being Pepper-Sprayed and Shocked with Tasers

    An alarming series of incidents offers some insight into how casual police have become about deploying “less lethal” weapons.

  • Seattle Education blog turns attention to Charter School push

    Beginning on Monday, December 26th, the focus of this blog will be on charter schools. Why charter schools? Because Stand for Children, the League of Education Voters, the Washington State PTA along with DFER will be descending upon our representatives in Olympia trying to convince them that the privatization of our public schools is what our state and children need.

• Civil Rights

  • Some Occupy L.A. protesters may get a lesson in free speech

    LA courts disgrace themselves by arresting peaceful protesters and then extorting money from them on behalf of a private company.

  • Santa’s Elves are Slaves in China

  • Argentina has foisted a ban on Falklands islands ships onto other countries in South America.

• Copyrights

  • The RIAA uses an excuse they usually don’t accept, that people are not responsible for the actions of others.