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Links - New and Old Censorship, Anti-trust, Privacy Violations and Pollution.

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  • Anti-Trust

    • Pay TV piracy hits News
      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.



    • Microsoft all but buys Netscape with AOL patent acqusition

      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

    • The reason I'm helping Chris Hedges' lawsuit against the NDAA
      the Homeland Battlefield Bill has already a chilling effect upon my ability to investigate and document matters of national controversy that would ordinarily be subject to my professional inquiry. It has therefore prevented my readers from receiving the full spectrum of truthful reporting which, in a functioning democracy, they have a right to expect.


    • Iraq’s internet on the brink
      A year since the Arab Spring, the internet in the region is facing significant threats from governments trying to gain more control over it.


    • Media companies & ISPs outline plan to stop piracy

      Not so voluntary censorship is set to roll out on people in the US. Appealing accusations of sharing will cost people $35.



    • World Without Web
      ... we underestimate the alarming degree of contingency lurking behind ‘inevitable’ developments. ... The divergence point for this history is in 1983-1984, when the leadership of DARPA lied through its teeth to Congress about who was being allowed access to the Internet. ... what if DARPA had been caught in that lie, funding for its network research scaled back, and a serious effort made to kick randoms off the early net?


    • CISPA – The Sneaky Son Of SOPA

      A good collection of links about a nasty law against sharing.





  • Civil Rights



  • Privacy



  • Education Watch



  • DRM

    • How Adobe DRM Requires People to Pirate Library Books
      Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. ... It turns out that a majority of the 6,495 titles available at my local library were accessible only through a locked .acsm file format. ...you can think of a .acsm file as being very much like a .torrent file. If you use Windows or Mac, you can (theoretically) download and install Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). This software reads the .acsm file and then it will download the actual .epub book, complete with DRM. ... there is no legal way to access the content without breaking the law if you are using free (libre) software.

      Tell your local librarian to never use a system like this!





  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Another Patent Attack on Google with More Wild $$ Predictions ~pj
      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


    • Oracle’s Position is Worse Than I Thought


    • USPTO Issues Interim Mayo Guidance ~pj
      "...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?


    • Mayo Decision Impacts Myriad Genetics - Judgment Vacated, Remanded ~pj
      Things are looking up in PatentLand


    • Prometheus bound: An important precedent for the next software patent case
      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

      • Judge rules file sharing is not a "conspiracy"
        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."


      • 5000+ Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion
        “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.”


      • 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up

        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.


      • DRM is crushing indie booksellers online


      • MPAA Lines Up With Porn Studio in Steamy Copyright Dispute

        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.







  • Recent Techrights' Posts

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    Mass Layoffs at Microsoft, March 2026
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    Will some investigative journalists do their job now and ask Microsoft tough questions?
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    Unlike Linuxiac, LinuxTeck wasn't very active in recent years
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    Links for the day
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    Microsoft GitHub is Not Free Hosting and It Won't Last
    Not for much longer [...] Microsoft is afraid to say that it is pulling the plug, but it seems inevitable
    "The Lost Generation" Came Back, This Time Literally
    Based on my limited experience with young people ("alphas"), they're lost
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    IBM Has Just Been Sued Again by Its Own Staff (This Time a Manager, Stephen P. Gutierrez)
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    Links for the day
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    Links for the day
    Garrett Announces LibreLocal Instance in Northampton, Massachusetts (USA)
    his message was the only one last month
    Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 8 Out of 200: Gross Misuse of UKGDPR to Protect the Agenda of American Back Doors (Mass Surveillance)
    Responding to bunk claims regarding UKGDPR and claims of 'analytics' in our sites
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    Links for the day
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    Links for the day
    Over at Tux Machines...
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    The harder they attack us, the more productive we become
    The Register MS Has Just Taken Money From Google (Where the Former Chief Editor Now Works) for Femmewashing and Ponzi Scheme Promotion
    now The Register MS not only promotes a Ponzi scheme but also bags money to pretend Google respects women
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    "I would never refer someone to work at IBM that I liked! I hope all of you have reviewed IBM on Glassdoor."
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    full paper
    RMS is 73 Next Week
    Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS) turns 73 exactly 7 days from now
    Iran & FSFE: blackmailing women, from football to the French Government (CNIL)
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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    The case is now being escalated to a Foreign Secretary and former Deputy Prime Minister
    Police investigations, lawsuits & Debian leader election candidate shortage
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Richard Stallman (RMS) Has Defeated Cancel Culture, a Mostly American Phenomenon
    RMS is talking now
    No Slop Found in RSS Feeds, Only in Google News
    No slopfarm will survive for very long, certainly it'll go bust as soon as readers (if it had any) know what it is
    Links 09/03/2026: Many Security Breaches and a Pandemic of Censorship
    Links for the day
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    bluewashing is only the first step
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    We assume he'll travel back to Boston after that
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    Maybe we should also stop seeing a doctor and instead ask chatbots about symptoms?
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    there is growing recognition for what he really did for everybody
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    Don't let London become the world's "crime capital"
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    The next strike is in 10 days' time and then there will be another strike
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    Links for the day
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    Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 7 Out of 200: Like With the Serial Strangler From Microsoft, Misuse of UK-GDPR to Try to Hide Embarrassing Facts
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    Sloppyleft
    Article by Alexandre Oliva