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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

    The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part II - UK SLAPPs for Americans, SLAPPs for Profit
    Brett Wilson LLP has a track record of this kind
    Cloudflare Gives Us All Another Reason to Boycott Cloudflare
    If Cloudflare wants to use its vast surveillance network (which is what it does as a CDN) to foist paywalls and maybe something worse (like DRM on top), then Cloudflare should be more widely rejected as a company
    Someone Expiring Certificates on the Day of the 9/11 Attacks is Not Someone I Would Want Controlling My PC (or Deciding What's Authorised for Booting)
    "social justice warriors"
    More Microsoft-Red Hat Cross-Pollination as the Company Loses a Managing Director
    some people move from Microsoft to Red Hat and some do the opposite
     
    The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part III - Spying on Reporters' Families, Chaining Cases for Microsoft Employees Who Demand Censorship of Facts (Even Politely Expressed)
    the time seems right to wrap up this introductory series
    Links 24/09/2025: "NASA Moving Out of Entire Buildings as It's Gutted" and Purge of Online Critics (Opposing Fascism Becomes Unlawful)
    Links for the day
    Science is Under Attack
    Oligarchy prefers a dumbed-down population
    The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has Reportedly Failed People With Wrong Advice
    At the moment the SRA has a PR blunder
    The Man Suing Brett Wilson LLP and Gervase de Wilde (5RB)
    Now he's probably using the (almost) 200,000 pounds he's supposed to receive to sue Brett Wilson LLP and former colleagues/partners
    Slopwatch: A World Wide Web That's Rotting for Companies That Won't Even Exist in a Few Years
    some of the junk Google News is promoting
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 23, 2025
    IRC logs for Tuesday, September 23, 2025
    Links 24/09/2025: Qt Creator 18 Beta, Microsoft Cannot Bail Out "ChatGPT" Anymore, China and US Intensify Censorship
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 24/09/2025: Gemlogs and Politics
    Links for the day
    Links 23/09/2025: Japan Limits Uses of Skinnerboxes ('Smartphones') With Toxic "Apps", Fentanylware (TikTok) Tapped by "MAGAts"
    Links for the day
    Brett Wilson LLP Has Just Been Sued (by Their Own Clients!)
    Vladimir and Alla Yanpolsky sued Brett Wilson LLP in BL-2025-001167 at the end of last week
    Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Links 23/09/2025: Massive Data Breach, Slop Versus Productivity, and Vista 11 Update Breaks Things Again
    Links for the day
    Code of Censorship
    Extortion is peace
    The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Un-cancelled the Best People, Just in Time for the Big 4-0
    Mr. Oliva should have been there all along (since 2019)
    Most "Modern" Technology Makes You Slower and Dumber
    Because proprietary software makes you worse off
    "What Comes After Free Software?" Wrongly Insinuates We've Reached the Goal (Prison is Not the Goal)
    The oil tycoons use similar tactics against environmentalists, giving them fake "wins"
    Making More Work Space
    I learned the hard way that less is more in circumstances where more means distraction
    MAHA is a Lie, Public Officials Never Valued Citizens' Health (They Still Value Private Businesses, Their Sponsors)
    Reject demagogues
    Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Press Kit for the Weekend After Next Weekend (40th Anniversary)
    miles better than social [sic] media [sic] quips, moderated by narcissists and oil tycoons.
    Microsoft Had Two Waves of Mass Layoffs This Month (That We Know of) and It'll Get Worse for Microsoft Soon
    Will the axe fall again by month's end?
    Gemini Links 23/09/2025: Happy Equinox, Photronic Arts, and Perception Cognition
    Links for the day
    Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
    GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda"
    Back to Normal Now, We Plan to Do More In-Depth Series (or Multi-part Stories)
    Articles (or series thereof) that contain philosophy are important to us
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 22, 2025
    IRC logs for Monday, September 22, 2025
    Microsoft Media is Panicking Amid Mass Layoffs Every Month, H-1B Fees, and "Seattle’s Tech Scene in Trouble"
    In "late stage Microsoft", copyleft becomes proprietary
    The Next Wave of IBM/Red Hat Layoffs Being Discussed Already
    Red Hat is sort of disappearing the way Tivoli did
    New Techrights Turns 2
    Today starts the third year of the SSG-based Techrights
    What Scares Them the Most is Independent News Sites That They Cannot Control and Censor
    Wikileaks was a good example of this
    If You Don't Control Your Online Platform, Then Someone Else is Controlling You
    be (or become) independent
    Oracle Started This Year With Slop. Then It Stopped.
    Passing fads are like this
    Distros That Run on PCs Made 20 Years Ago and Don't Use Systemd
    Betas for now
    The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has a Policy on Racism and Sexism
    In then future we'll show the misogyny and racial slurs
    The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part I - Abusing British Women on Behalf of American Men Who Abuse American Women
    Transparency is important to us, so we've decided to make this series
    Slopwatch: Google News and the Evident Slopfarm Infestation
    This is what people get about Linux when they query Google for Linux
    Links 22/09/2025: Murdochs Might Join Fentanylware (TikTok) 'Investors' (Masters), United Kingdom Recognises Palestinian Statehood
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Esperanto Music History and Apps For Android
    Links for the day
    Links 22/09/2025: More American 'Censorship' (Retaliation for Journalism), Cheeto "Might Be Losing His Race Against Time"
    Links for the day
    The Blob Slop
    Give me more words, give me some text
    The 50-Pound Note Experiment and the "War on Cash"
    Britain is actually seeing a rebound in cash payments, and it's not a temporary phenomenon
    Slopwatch: Blaming the Victims for Microsoft's Failures and Plagiarising Phoronix
    That's what Google has been reduced to: slop and slopfarms
    Links 22/09/2025: Breaches, Windows TCO, and Arrests
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Rabbit Hole and DeGoogling Fairphone
    Links for the day
    Links 22/09/2025: Russian War Planes Invade NATO Airspace While Dihydroxyacetone Man Escalates Attack on Free Speech Because of Critics
    Links for the day
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 21, 2025
    IRC logs for Sunday, September 21, 2025