04.20.12
Posted in Site News at 1:19 am by Guest Editorial Team
-
Security
Finance
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Censorship
-
-
-
-
allows companies or the government1 free rein to bypass existing laws in order to monitor communications, filter content, or potentially even shut down access to online services for “cybersecurity purposes.” Companies are encouraged to share data with the government and with one another, and the government can share data in return. … because “us[ing] cybersecurity systems” is incredibly vague, it could be interpreted to mean monitoring email, filtering content, or even blocking access to sites. A company acting on a “cybersecurity threat” would be able to bypass all existing laws, including laws prohibiting telcos from routinely monitoring communications, so long as it acted in “good faith.”
-
Privacy
-
Continuing our campaign against the cyberspying bill better known as CISPA, EFF has signed on to two coalition letters urging legislators to drop their support for the Rogers cybersecurity bill (HR 3523). One coalition is focused on the disastrous privacy implications of the bill, while the other identifies major government accountability issues it would introduce.
-
-
[It] is threatening the rights of people in America, and effectively rights everywhere, because what happens in America tends to affect people all over the world. Even though the SOPA and PIPA acts were stopped by huge public outcry, it’s staggering how quickly the US government has come back with a new, different, threat to the rights of its citizens
-
-
Despite efforts to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, the bill has gained six more co-sponsors in the past two days, bringing the total to 112.
-
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.19.12
Posted in Site News at 1:58 am by Guest Editorial Team
Security
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
-
Cop watching — the act of turning a camera on police — is not illegal. But in areas policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it can still land you in jail. … She spent a hellish night in a cell with no bed, forced to sleep on a cold floor. “They kept the air-conditioning running full blast like they wanted to punish me,” she says … when the jailers returned her belongings, her camcorder footage had been erased — an act that First Amendment attorneys say is illegal. It also violates department policy. She was told the obstruction charge had been dropped and was handed a written citation for being “under the influence of a controlled substance.”
The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users?
Drug use seems to be a catch all accusation thrown against people the police don’t like.
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
Finance
Anti-Trust
-
This is called dumping. People who fall for it will also end up with ATT/Microsoft, how miserable.
-
Microsoft is not a free software company because they don’t think they can screw users enough that way and would rather go bankrupt.
-
Both points 3 and 4 [Firewall open source licensing and patent liability so that they can give as little and threaten as much as possible] are widely understood to be part of the reason Microsoft started the Outercurve Foundation, as a destination to outsource open source projects it wanted to start while isolating itself from any perceived risks its imaginative legal time might envisage.
Censorship
Privacy
-
Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act’s expanded police powers — and win. … His recipe for Calyx was inspired by those six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that’s stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can’t read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year.
-
The bill would create a loophole in all existing privacy laws, allowing companies to share Internet users’ data with the National Security Agency, part of the Department of Defense, and the biggest spy agency in the world — without any legal oversight. If CISPA passes, companies like Google and Facebook could pass your online communications to the military, just by claiming they were motivated by “cybersecurity purposes.” CISPA would give the companies immunity from lawsuits if you want to challenge what they are doing. Once the government has the information, the bill allows them to use it for any legal purpose other than regulation, not just for stopping cybersecurity threats.
This bill would complete the public/private cooperation started by the U SAP AT RIOT ACT and legalize the worst abuses.
-
defense contractors, many already working with the National Security Agency on related data-mining projects, are lobbying to press forward. Like many bad policy ideas, entrenched government contractors seem to be using taxpayer money to lobby for even more power and profit.
Microsoft, of course, is on the list but so are other big hitters like Lockheed Martin. Richard Stallman, in his political notes, says, “The Internet defeated SOPA with the help of many of the same businesses that are ready to acquiesce to CISPA. CISPA is the test for whether the users of the Internet can block an oppressive law.”
Civil Rights
-
American workers have lost all their bargaining power. … First, American multinational corporations now locate much of their production abroad. Second, with the rate of private-sector unionization down to a microscopic 6.9 percent, workers have no power to bargain for higher pay. Employers can serenely blow them off — and judging by the data, that’s exactly what employers are doing.
Education Watch
Internet/Net Neutrality
DRM
Copyrights
-
to claim that the protections of the author are greater than or even equal to the benefits to the nation, is a clear flip-flopping of the method with the purpose. Of course, in doing so, it not only flip flops the method and the purpose, but it completely distorts the nature of copyright law, and leads to maximalist-style positions, where absolutely no consideration is given to how the public benefits (or, more importantly, is hurt) from specific changes to copyright law.
-
The case was thrown out but Goldman Sach’s programmer spent a year in jail and the judges recommended changes to law that would criminalize what he did.
-
The propaganda machine is failing as artists succeed.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.14.12
Posted in Site News at 6:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: TechBytes update after last night’s recording
THIS YEAR I stayed over at Tim’s house a couple of times. I saw how hard it is to record with two young children around (I am godfather of his daughter). Hopefully, having just recorded the second episode of this year, Tim and I will manage to record a lot more regularly and we may also keep the show’s length shorter to make that feasible. Richard Stallman is still scheduled to be on the show, but we haven’t managed to organise anything; even last night’s recording was planned at very short notice (just minutes). Thanks to all those who listen to the show and give it reason to exist. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Site News at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A call for the community to become more actively involved in Techrights
DUE to me doubling my working hours and owing to personal reasons, I have not been able to keep up with the news recently, let alone record TechBytes. Patent news items are accumulating in my box, Novell news I have not kept up with in over a month, and Gates watching is very badly curtailed. Right now the priorities have changed to focus on GNU/Linux first, not only in blog posts/wiki but also in our daily links. If anyone is willing to help with news coverage and can contribute posts, please come to the IRC channels to discuss. We still attract thousands of hundreds of hits per day and can’t fulfill the potential of this high reach. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.10.12
Posted in Site News at 12:55 am by Guest Editorial Team
Hardware
Health/Nutrition
-
-
FDA is kicking the BPA-lined can further down the road in an announcement today that the Agency plans to keep studying this issue while consumers continue to be exposed. Specifically, the Agency’s response to NRDC’s petition is: “FDA has determined, as a matter of science and regulatory policy, that the best course of action at this time is to continue our review and study of emerging data on BPA.”
Security
Defence/Police/Aggression
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
New studies show impact of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster on dolphins and other marine wildlife may be far worse than feared
-
Storms continue to stir up oil which kills sea life and poisons people.
-
-
Radium, toluene, benzine and other nasties lead to abortions, birth defects and breast cancer around fracking rigs. Abusive oil company culture also promotes crime.
-
Parts of each town will remain off-limits because of higher exposure levels. Eight other towns in the same low-contamination category have not yet decided which areas should be reopened.
-
-
Obviously climate science was a mature field even then: the concepts and conclusions have not changed all that much. Hansen et al clearly indicate what was well known (all of which still stands today) and what was uncertain. … It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test.
Finance
Anti-Trust
-
The actions are documented in an archive of 14,400 emails held by former Metropolitan Police commander Ray Adams who was European chief for Operational Security between 1996 and 2002. The Financial Review is publishing thousands of the emails on its website at URL afr.com.
The emails show that Murdoch used “piracy” as a competitive weapon, helping people to break the digital handcuffs of rival’s pay TV boxes. The loss of face and revenue helped Murdoch to consolidate his media empire.
-
This Microsoft friendly news source uses gloats over this superposed “end of the browser wars” and uses the term “intellectual property” while glorifying and validating software patents.
Censorship
Civil Rights
Privacy
-
-
The procedures endorsed by the majority are forbidden by statute in at least 10 states and are at odds with the policies of federal authorities. According to a supporting brief filed by the American Bar Association, international human rights treaties also ban the procedures.
Humilliation is not just for the airport.
-
In the concert venue example, a ticket seller could inform someone if any of their Facebook friends were going to a given concert, Williams said. That could give them the chance to meet up or let the vendor persuade the consumer to buy a ticket, he said. … [PJ: This is creepy. Does you pretty teenage daughter actually know all her so-called "friends" on Facebook? ...]
-
The way they spied on what users typed into the Google Toolbar was no accident and I doubt this is either. Non free software always demands the ability to spy.
Education Watch
-
the United States is the only country where Gülen has been able to fully fund schools with taxpayer money. In all other nations, Gülen schools are what one would expect they would be: private religious schools.
-
DRM
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Nokia and Microsoft. Partners at law, so to speak. Is this another Microsoft/Nokia outsourced production? Remember when Barnes & Noble told us that it views Microsoft and Nokia’s patent campaign as an antitrust violation, a deliberate campaign to destroy Android and maintain Microsoft’s monopoly on the desktop and extend it to smartphones, with Nokia piggybacking with its patents for weapons and MOSAID being brought in to do some of the dirty work?
So when you read the scare headlines, remember this: Google is awesome at patent litigation. It tends to prevail. I told you that when Oracle first sued Google
-
-
“…the claimed product or process amounts to significantly more than a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea with conventional steps specified at a high level of generality appended thereto.” Why *wouldn’t* that apply to software?
-
Things are looking up in PatentLand
-
Plainly, this was not a dispute about software patents, but the Court’s unanimous opinion will guide it and lower courts as they analyze future software patent cases.
-
Copyrights
-
The litigators are trying to get around the fact that judges aren’t happy with allowing mass lawsuits, so what they are doing is taking one internet user to court but using that lawsuit as a pretext to subpoena other defendants who had participated in the same BitTorrent swarm. … James Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois raised his eyebrow in disgust at this trick, saying that it was trying to get around the “stiffening judicial headwind.”
-
“We’re one of the worlds top 60 sites in the Internet. This brings us a responsibility to use the site to do something good. When I think about it, it’s insane that all the other top 100 sites only blast ads and self-centered stuff on their front pages. We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we’re everything the major labels are not.”
-
See also this excllent summary
To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.
-
-
A video site that published movies as urls is surprised that people would download those movies. They also found a judge that agrees enough to shut down a website where users share the urls, sometimes as embedded movies.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.06.12
Posted in Site News at 12:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Rights still defended
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.01.12
Posted in Site News at 2:40 pm by Guest Editorial Team
-
-
Princeton University’s Office of Information Technology recently polled 150 students who tested Google Apps’ Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 and results showed only two preferred the latter.
-
Science
-
Simply activating a tiny number of neurons can conjure an entire memory.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Security
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
Republicans are obsessed with abortion but have little interest in protecting fetuses from birth defects due to toxic chemicals from the environment. Some Republicans want to punish pregnant women who do anything that hurts a fetus. Strange that they don’t care about the problem when a factory causes it.
-
-
Agency Rejects Scientific Advisory Committee’s Recommendation to Strengthen Pollution Standard to Safeguard Wildlife and Environment
-
Business as usual.
-
-
Finance
-
-
In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income.
-
The US required cities and states to buy, from the banksters, billions of dollars worth of fixed-rate loans as a hedge against possible high interest rates. Then the US drove down interest rates to cater to the banksters, making our cities lose while the banksters win.
-
Anti-Trust
-
to make its own life easier, ASCAP just pays those performance royalties to the top 200 grossing tours in the US, and every other touring musician is more or less screwed
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.
-
Censorship
-
Over the last week, supporters of Tibet, and the merely curious, have seen information warfare up close. On Twitter, several hundred bots (automated programs that generate content) flooded discussions using the hashtags #Tibet and #Freetibet with meaningless tweets and spam. If you were someone trying to learn more about Tibet, you kept bumping up against these threads, and eventually you may have given up and moved on to some other subject. … More malevolently, Tibetan activists have been threatened on Twitter.
It’s nice to see mainstream media understand some of the problems that people on technical forums pointed out a decade ago. It’s too bad they only took note when it happened to something they cared about.
-
This and recent demands of Facebook passwords are an attempt by the rich and powerful to intimidate people and keep them from organizing. Don’t let them shut you up or drive you underground.
-
an online publication of the University of Illinois, Chicago, finds that censors in China delete around 16 percent of the messages submitted to Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese version of Twitter.
-
Note how Sarkozy cites the prohibition of “child pornography” as a precedent for prohibiting access to a political opinion. The idea that this was the thin edge of the wedge is no longer just a theory. It is an excuse for censoring all sorts of things. No matter how disgusting some works may be, censorship is more disgusting.
-
From the 1970s until recently, Congress allowed and encouraged a great deal of financial market deregulation … Congress is about to make the same kind of mistake again – this time abandoning much of the 1930s-era securities legislation that both served investors well and helped make the US one of the best places in the world to raise capital. … A new venture could raise up to $1-2 million through internet solicitations, as long as no investor puts in more than $10,000 (section 301 of HR3606). The level of disclosure would be minimal and there would be no real penalties for outright lying. There would also be no effective oversight of such stock promotion – returning us precisely to the situation that prevailed in the 1920s.
See also, “This business startups act is a hucksters’ charter“
-
Privacy
-
Civil Rights
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
The bill, H.R. 3309, is called the “FCC Process Reform Act of 2011.” … will disable the FCC, not reform it. … by creating a special set of vague and novel procedural hurdles for the FCC to which no other agency is subject and that will require another decade of litigation to clarify. … [and] significantly reducing the FCC’s ability to take the public interest into account … making every single one of the FCC’s regulatory analyses in support of a new rule — and not just the rule itself — subject to judicial review. Don’t like the FCC’s suggestion that public interest values are worth taking into account? Sue, and paralyze the Commission.
I imagine this is mostly aimed at stopping the FCC’s TV white space Open Spectrum initiatives. Big media already has egregious monopolies but Open Spectrum can undo them, so publishers seek government unjust government protection of their technically obsolete business models.
-
Now that Microsoft has admitted to spying on Skype users, this is a good idea but that’s not what ISPs have in mind.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.21.12
Posted in Site News at 2:11 am by Guest Editorial Team
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
