08.28.11
Posted in America, Patents at 9:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patents are viewed as anti-competitive and Verizon’s Chief Counsel asks the President of the United States to address the problem
UNHAPPY with the USPTO, more and more companies — not just individuals — rant in public. Novell has been mentioned quite a bit in relation to the Motorola patents (Mobility) sale because in both cases companies were valued not for real property but for monopolies they received from the government. In Novell’s case, the patents went into CPTN, which Microsoft and Apple would use for anti-competitive purposes. In fact, around the time of the Motorola-Google agreement there were several articles from reputable source calling patents “anti-competitive”, referencing Google's allegations including exact quotes [1, 2]. Another large party that engages in this anti-competitive war is Oracle, which Groklaw keeps tracking because of the anti-Android lawsuit. As we have shown here many times before, Microsoft-connected (via IV) patent trolls also launch lawsuits against Android developers, so the EFF organises an event which will inform them. To quote:
As you probably know, we’ve been closely following the Lodsys mess and watching as the patent troll asserts its patents against companies large and small, and — famously and most egregiously — against small app developers. Large companies such as Best Buy, CVS, and the New York Times Company are fighting Lodsys in court (and challenging the validity of its patents). But those lawsuits could take years. In the meantime, app developers all over the world, many of who cannot afford legal counsel, face the uncertainty long-felt by the victims of patent trolls and are left wondering what they can and should do to protect themselves.
Microsoft is meanwhile getting more patents on tablets and the New York Times does its usual thing by batting for Apple’s patents, praising those with Jobs’ name on them. To quote the heading paragraph:
The 313 Apple patents that list Steven P. Jobs among the group of inventors offer a glimpse at his legendary say over the minute details of the company’s products — from the company’s iconic computer cases to the glass staircases that are featured in many Apple stores
A lot of people may not remember it, but Apple’s eagerness to sue iPhone competitors using patents was first seen coming from Cook (Apple’s new CEO), who issued a veiled threat to Palm after they had unveiled WebOS. This was so serious that it later led to a formal complaint to the US government. We do not expect Apple to be any gentler after Jobs’ distancing from the company. Apple cannot compete so fairly anymore. Linux is catching up in terms of market share, having already outpaced Apple features-wise. First it happened in phones and now it happens in tablets.
“Linux is catching up in terms of market share, having already outpaced Apple features-wise.”Here is a good visual overview which shows what has happened in the market due to patents. This has clearly gone out of control and helped the exclusion of small players (or those without many patents). It also became a breeding group for parasitic entities. Well, citing this analysis, a Microsoft-friendly site says that someone “even thinks that we are in the middle of a patent bubble.”
It also says: “Software patents often cover a very broad scope, while they should be more concrete and narrow. This is due to the fact that large organizations are increasingly using them for legal warfare. Such abuse of patents prevents innovation instead of enforcing it. And even worse, smaller companies or indivduals cannot afford the time and money for a patent lawsuit. Eventually, software patents enforce monopolies. To give an impression: An Android phone covers around 250.000 patents according to Google.”
Realising that something is clearly amiss here (too much counter-productive tension and aggression), the Chief Counsel of Verizon is calling for Obama to step in. As one site puts it: “Recently, all of the major players in the smartphone industry have been tied up in patent wars. Apple, Google, Research In Motion (Blackberry), and Microsoft. Even hardware manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, and Motorola have seen their fair share of patent warfare this year. Each small judgement in court continues to highlight the ongoing ‘Google vs. Apple’ battle.
“Google has been a dark horse in the smartphone industry as it is seemingly giving away its Android software for free. Google also holds a huge advantage over its competition with the enormous amount of advertising revenue it brings in from its search engine. Google uses this revenue as a way to create profit from its software inventions. Because of this advantage, most of the smartphone industry looks to Google as an undeniable freight train, patents or no patents. Which brings us to why Apple is putting up the biggest fight.”
Here is another new piece of criticism about the system. It states the following:
The state of Intellectual Property (IP) in general (copyrights, patents, trademarks) has gotten stupidly bad over the last few years. Systems that were created to encourage innovation with the public as the benefactor have got turned completely on their heads; today the systems stifle creativity, benefit big corporations solely, and harm society. As a Linux user this isn’t news to you, I’m sure. But I’ll bet your neighbor doesn’t really know how bad it is, or might even think the system is “working”. How do we wake the general public up?
My goal here is not to explain what is wrong with current IP laws. That’s covered quite well on other sites, like Techdirt and the Deeplinks Blog by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Those are great resources for someone who really wants to delve into the mess that is IP regulation, but is probably a little more than your typical layperson can digest.
With the increasing realisation that patents are just over-hyped and actually quite harmful, change is likely to happen. Will Obama bring it? █
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Posted in Africa, Bill Gates, Patents at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Antagonism towards Gates’ staged care for the poor and resistance against his push to make impoverished populations dependent on expensive drugs he Mo Ibrahim in and lobbies for
THE CORPORATE press might not be paying attention to the reality of whitewashing/reputation laundering operations, but some people do cover the issue. They don’t play along with public relations (PR). One valuable new quote goes like this: ‘Speaking to the efforts of the Bill Gateses and the Bonos of the world, Ibrahim says, “We thank all the philanthropic [institutions], the wonderful people who are helping the needy in Africa. But the job in our foundation is to really stop all that by changing the political outlook of Africa, changing the way we’re managing our affairs. There’s no need for us to beg for money.” He adds, “I don’t want Africa to forever be the recipient of aid. Aid is also humiliating for the recipient. And it touches a human indignity. Why? We are able-bodied people. We are not sick people.”’
“Aid is also humiliating for the recipient. And it touches a human indignity.”
–Mo Ibrahim It’s actually worse than that. Gates is exploiting the perception that they are sick to impose clinical trials on them, at the behest of people whom he employed (e.g. from GSK) and companies he invests his money in. Any clinical trials on Africans have lower risk of litigation when things go awry, as they often do (but again, this is barely being reported on because it happens remotely). This is helping everyone spend money on drugs, creating an addiction/dependence on those expensive drugs. One magazine has just had this to say (also about Africa): ‘To learn to live with it calls for an entirely different solution. Eradication calls for a laboratory-based strategy. You look for isolated human communities, like islands with small populations and invest all your resources in it – which is what the Gates Foundation and WHO did. But living with malaria requires you to spend your monies in communities with large, representative populations.
‘The Gates Foundation and WHO money was spent mostly on small islands. A WHO expert called it ‘a public health disaster’. The moral of the story is that diagnosis is more important than prescription. Research is diagnosis.”‘
Techrights has written a lot more and provided more evidence to show the sad reality of the ‘donation’ of medicine (temporary access to patents valid in another country). More journalists need to do their job and actually report on these issues properly; they are being marginalised by Gates’ ‘donations’ (bribes) to many publishers. He spends over $1,000,000 per day on “advocacy” (PR alone). █
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Posted in Bill Gates at 8:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Except Windows, what does Gates want to teach all the children?
Summary: Gates’ latest monopolisation endeavours are being explained by an investigative report (not the usual PR) about a so-called ‘reform’
TECHRIGHTS encourages readers who distrust the Gates Foundation or are sceptical of Bill Gates despite all the press he buy for himself to read this report from Newsweek and partner sites:
Back to School for the Billionaires
The richest man in America stepped to the podium and declared war on the nation’s school systems. High schools had become “obsolete” and were “limiting—even ruining—the lives of millions of Americans every year.” The situation had become “almost shameful.” Bill Gates, prep-school grad and college dropout, had come before the National Governors Association seeking converts to his plan to do something about it—a plan he would back with $2 billion of his own cash.
Gates’s speech, in February 2005, was a signature moment in what has become a decade-long campaign to improve test scores and graduation rates, waged by a loose alliance of wealthy CEOs who arrived with no particular background in education policy—a fact that has led critics to dismiss them as “the billionaire boys’ club.” Their bets on poor urban schools have been as big as their egos and their bank accounts. Microsoft chairman Gates, computer magnate Michael Dell, investor Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Walmart fame have collectively poured some $4.4 billion into school reform in the past decade through their private foundations.
Remember how Gates wishes to treat teachers and how teachers feel about it (not the astroturf he pays to pretend to represent teachers). See this discussion. █
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Posted in Mail, Microsoft, Novell at 7:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A long look at the past week’s news confirms a trend involving the collapse of Novell’s products, staff, and clients base
Attachmate never promised much to Novell staff. A lot of the staff got laid off and many others — managers included — moved on in their careers. In the news these days we continue to spot former Novell staff like this one and this other bunch including Stafford Massie. Rather than help Microsoft’s slave, Novell, they actually do something better somewhere else.
Based on this article, “Ivancic said that prior to the acquisition, Novell products competed with each other for resources, leaving legacy applications like GroupWise and NetWare in the cold.”
Well, they still are “in the cold.” We heard nothing about GroupWise from Attachmate. In fact, GroupWise has just been dumped again, this time in District 719. To quote:
The District 719 School Board approved a $160,849 multi-part project to update the district’s current systems. The initiative includes upgrading the district server infrastructure, migrating email service to Microsoft Outlook from Novell GroupWise and developing a hosted archive for correspondence and e-mail communication.
So Microsoft benefits, as usual.
“Attachmate has also officially killed some Novell products other than Mono.”GroupWise is generally dying and even its key staff has been leaving. As one new article puts it, “Canada currently uses three different email platforms: 80% of departments use Microsoft Outlook, 15% use Lotus Notes, and 5% use Novell Groupwise. As a result, departments have adopted a variety of email rules and practices, which results in duplication of effort and less secure email, the government noted.”
Attachmate has also officially killed some Novell products other than Mono. But someone ends up promoting Vibe even after it’s officially dead. It makes no sense.
Attachmate has been replacing many Novell managers with some of its own people. Here is another shuffle:
After the take-over of Novell in April, the Attachmate Group shuffled a number of its high profile executive roles, including the appointment of former NZ general manager, Boris Ivancic to vice-president and general manager of Asia-Pacific.
According to this article from the UK, “Almost four months after its acquisition by Attachmate Group, Novell’s EMEA channel chief has opened up about the vendor’s vision for its indirect channel.” It is funny to see him act like a PR person, whose claims of success are very hard to ingest. Attachmate has basically done just about nothing to help Novell’s products. It’s not clear why Attachmate bought Novell in the first place; maybe someone just needed to take the non-patents part of Novell (the patents went to Microsoft) and do the least possible with it (as that competes against Microsoft). Who benefits from this? Surely not Attachmate. Remember who funded this acquisition. █
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 7:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: SUSE wants to put its Microsoft-backed distro on people’s computers
ONE SUSE blogger (there are not many left except Attachmate/SUSE staff and people who are paid to work on SUSE through GSoC) speaks of a “preload department at SuSE,” stating that the network Image Installer he works on is “also capable of installing arbitrary openSUSE / Fedora / Ubuntu versions…”
It is probably worth emphasising yet again that SUSE is funded by Microsoft and it pays Microsoft for GNU/Linux. If SUSE gets preloaded on a machine, that’s a victory for Microsoft. Here at Techrights we officially boycott SUSE following its patent deal with Microsoft. SUSE is also a subsidiary of a Microsoft partner. █
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Posted in Finance, Novell at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The ruthless man behind Elliott Management Corp. is reportedly agitating Brocade
CORPORATE RAIDERS are a parasite of society and they have a very negative impact on everything around them. Nobody wants them except those who use them to destroy a competitor, such as Yahoo! or even Novell. In prior years we wrote many posts about the man who put Novell on sale against Novell's will. His name is Paul Singer, but he hides behind a firm called “Elliot”.
According to several news reports, Mr. Singer is still on his warpath of destruction (for profit). “Elliott Gains Opening to Press for Change With Brocade Stake” says one headline and in all the mentioned article Novell is mentioned too, including this one, stating:
Elliott Management Corp., the investor that pushed Novell Inc. to sell itself last year, amassed an 8.5 percent stake in Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (BRCD), gaining an opening it could use to agitate for change.
The man who should be under investigation for his unethical operations from tax havens, but he is celebrated as a rich man and he is still out for new prey. This is a sad testament that helps show why the bubble economy has had no barriers. For more context see:
- Novell May be Going Private, Hedge Fund Has Cash
- Analyst Expects Microsoft Bid to Buy Novell
- Ron Hovsepian Receives Another Large Lump of Cash as Novell Sale Looms
- GNU/Linux-Savvy Writers View Elliot Associates as Bad Neighbourhood
- Firm Behind Novell Bid Has Shady Past, Could be Tied to Microsoft (Paul E. Singer’s ‘Vulture Fund’)
- Simon Phipps: “Seems Even With Microsoft’s Support Novell Couldn’t Cut It”
- Vulture Fund Still the Only Bidder for Novell
Whether it’s Carl Icahn or Paul Singer, the US citizenry needs to realise that this type of activities is far more dangerous/costly than foreign and domestic terrorism. This is akin to some kind of “financial terrorism”, but those who commit those acts are never punished. The corporate press usually glorifies these people. █
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Posted in America, Europe, Patents at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Bradley Manning, by Daniel Joseph Barnhart Clark
Summary: US politicians who are funded by taxpayers are seen pushing the agenda of big corporations into Europe, elevating the risk of software patents there
WIKILEAKS has been releasing many Cablegate leaks over the past week. One that caught our attention which also relates to Techrights mentions the EU patent mess (going under many names that keep changing to confuse critics) just before it talks about ACTA. To quote this item from a year and a half ago:
EU Patent breakthrough
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¶2. (U) On December 4 the EU Competitiveness Council battled toward
a so-called 'general approach' on a future patent system, together
with an agreement on the basis of a draft regulation for European
Union patents. The issue has bogged down the European Commission
and the Council for over 40 years. Today, the cost of getting an
EU-wide patent is eleven times that of getting the same protection
in the U.S. The Council conclusions also contain the main elements
of a single European Patent Court that will try cases on both the EU
patent and existing European patents. In today's system, patent
processes for one and the same invention must be conducted
separately in each Member State. The establishment of a single
court could mean annual savings of up to USD 42 billion for European
companies.
¶3. (U) Leading the objections to the Swedish EU Presidency's
proposal for a general approach was Denmark. The Danes, though,
finally withdrew their legalistic objections after it became clear
that changes to the Swedish proposal would not be acceptable. The
Swedish 'general approach' on the EU patent regulation means a real
breakthrough. The all important issue of translation will now be
left for agreement at a "later" date.
¶4. (U) The agreement paves the way for further discussion, under
Spanish and other Presidencies, towards a future patent system.
This would be based on two main pillars. Firstly, a unified patent
litigation system with exclusive jurisdiction for civil litigation
related to patent infringements and validity of EU and European
patents. There would be a court of first instance comprised of a
central division as well as local and regional divisions (in member
states). There would also be a court of appeal.
¶5. (U) Comment. This is a major accomplishment of the Swedish
Presidency. It was the top EU Presidency priority of Trade Minister
Bjorling. The issue has been blocked for over 40 years. Sweden
made a serious effort to break the deadlock during its EU Presidency
in 2001. Although the tricky language question remains, it is
likely that it will be possible to solve that piece separately.
This breakthrough on a European patent is a welcome addition to the
Swedish list of accomplishments during the Presidency, which
includes the Lisbon treat...
Let’s remember that some pro-patents people tried to daemonise Richard Stallman for warning about this. We named some German patent lawyers who did this; they really want software patents (more so than any other EU-based lawyers we have seen so far) and among them there is also a soccer lobbyist pretending to be a patents expert and occasional Mono apologist (Mono is mostly history based on the news as the most exposure it receives is from blogs). He is pretending to be the opposition while patent lawyers pretend to be the voice of German people. Watch this pro-software patents lobbyist being called “anti-software patents campaigner” in this article which says: “They are not the only ones: Apple’s Hague-based action has also spurred some interesting questions in the patent community about the role of IP in competitive products. In a blog posting, prominent EU anti-software patents campaigner Florian Mueller suggested that the patents cited in Apple’s Hague complaint should not have been granted in the first place.”
Microsoft also hired front groups to pretend to represent small business. Writers who describe this lobbyist as “anti-software patents campaigner” are either dishonest or gullible and they ought to be corrected. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Two distributions I found myself playing with time and time again were Ubuntu and Mepis. Ubuntu was still a fledgling at the version Breezy Badger, so I restricted it to a separate partition from Mepis. Mepis quickly became my main squeeze in the place of Mandriva. It came on a Live CD (which many distributions had yet to do at this time period), came with handy tools for repairing botched installations (which happened a lot with all my tinkering and learning), was easy to use, and was blazingly fast. Best of all though the community welcomed me with open arms and never in the entire time I spent there made me feel like a “stupid noob”.
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Server
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Linux systems have long been used as server operating systems, and have risen to prominence in that area. They have become increasingly popular in the last decade due to pricing, compared to other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. In fact, the ten fastest supercomputers in the world run on Linux.
The development of Linux has been one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially, by anyone under an appropriate license.
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Kernel Space
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Samsung has published the code to a new open-source DRM driver for its EXYNOS4210 System-On-a-Chip. The EXYNOS4210 has impressive 3D graphics capabilities, uses the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, and is used in various smart-phones. The Samsung Galaxy S II is one of the smart-phones using the Exynos 4210 SoC. Samsung is hoping to push this DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel.
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Applications
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Lucian: My name is Lucian Langa, I’ve been involved with GNOME for a few years. I’ve been working on a few free software projects over the time:evolution, evolution-plugins (rss,rpsam,tray). Find a more complete list over here: https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/cooly. I also have been involved with electronics, micro-controllers and embedded projects for some time, mostly software related.
F4S: What is gnoduino?
Lucian: Gnoduino is basically an implementation of the arduino IDE in Python. We are trying to emulate upstream as best as we can. However there are things we do differently as the primary target is GNOME desktop integration.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In Fedora Linux 14, the default photo manager and digital camera application is Shotwell. I tried using it, I really tried, but I ended up giving up because it was not easy to use in my opinion. In fact, I also tried to run one of my relatives through it on his desktop which also runs Fedora 14, and I concluded it just wasn’t worth fighting. For one, Shotwell seems to want to keep all information about photos and their data in its own database. That’s fine, but it makes it non-intuitive when you want to move photos into folders and sort them in ways that are different than Shotwell sorts them (which by default is to create one folder per year, month, and day). When simply moving photos to subfolders, Shotwell loses the thumbnails and doesn’t know where the photos are moved to. Also, Shotwell has its own Trash folder which makes it confusing when trying to clean up photos. While Shotwell’s features could be an advantage to some, in this case it did not work out so well.
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GNOME Desktop
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A long time has gone since I posted the (in)famous bug regarding graphical corruption on GNOME3 seen only by ATI users who use the proprietary case. After long hours of frustration I’ve decided to jump into Intel chipsets which work very nicelly out of the box and leave ATI behind, but new developments suggest that ATI/AMD has fixed the bug and it’s under internal testing, so it seems that within one or two releases this bug will be fixed.
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I’m a rather outspoken user of Arch Linux after having used and tried many other distributions (MandrakeSoft/Mandriva, Suse, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, SLAX, Chakra and even a few others) and I think I got to like the rolling release concept quite a lot. The rolling release concept essentially takes away the notion of milestone release for a Linux distribution and replaces it by incremental and almost continuous updates. Which means that everyday I can update my system and it’s thus almost always running the most recent stable software versions. Note that the upgrade is my choice only, I could stop doing this for 3 weeks instance and that would be fine. Using Arch Linux does not only mean embracing the rolling release distribution model. It also means being ready to install your system from the command line (granted, you only do that once in theory) which can be tedious but not reall difficult. Another “side effect” of using Arch Linux is that the distribution’s package management is done entirely through the command line and with the help of the excellent package manager pacman. Pacman is however not a graphical package manager, or rather, it does not come with a default, out of the box graphical front-end. Several of them do exist but it does not seem to be in the culture of Arch Linux to use one on a regular basis. Enter AppSet. AppSet is a very nice graphical package manager written in Qt; it even got me use KDE again on par with Gnome. AppSet does not only run on Arch Linux, it also supports Chakra (a very close fork of Arch Linux) and works in theory with any other packaging system.
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Red Hat Family
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One good thing about a market collapse is that it exposes value in what had been speculation.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot is marching ahead. Through our detailed reviews of Alpha 2 and Alpha 3 releases, we followed Ubuntu 11.10 in its each and every developmental phase so far. A lot of things have changed since the third alpha release and as we had promised, here is a preview of latest round of changes in Ubuntu 11.10 and a quick screenshot tour.
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Flavours and Variants
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There is a new Linux distribution making the rounds and it is pretty impressive for a number of reasons.
The first is the minimal requirements it has and the second is the clean look and feel of this distribution.
It is called Bodhi Linux and is available at bodhilinux.com.
Among its many features is that this distribution will run on just about any piece of hardware. It has reportedly been successfully installed on a 386 machine from decades ago. In fact, the stated minimum requirements for this free operating system are a 386 processor, with 1.5 gigabytes of hard drive space and only 128 megabytes of ram.
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Phones
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Most phones shipped in 2015 will be smartphones
ANALYST OUTFIT IHS Isuppli claims that smartphones will make up the majority of mobile phone sales by 2015.
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Android
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TWO IPAD RIVALS, the HTC Flyer and Motorola Xoom tablets have had their prices slashed by several retailers.
Although the tablets haven’t seen the same deep price cuts as HP’s Touchpad, which was reduced to around $100 last week and is now sold out, the Flyer can be picked up for £150 less at Carphone Warehouse.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It remains to be seen if it’ll materialize and cannibalize Amazon’s own bestselling Kindle e-reader, or if those two devices will remain separate draws for buyers (as a recent Nielsen survey suggests). Msnbc.com’s own Wilson Rothman thinks that when it does appear, it’s going to give the iPad a run for its top spot, mostly because of its might as a retailer. It’s a major factor that Kravitz agrees with: “Not only does Amazon have the name and reach to get an attractive piece of hardware into millions of hands at a competitive price, but they also have the content and retail inventories to sweeten the pot with all sorts of tie-ins.”
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He said that world class open source digital resources are developed and used in the education sector in India.
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As part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in India, the Technopark, Trivandrum based International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) recently held a consultation on ‘Future Directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark, to establish future directions for use and promotion of FOSS in India.
The consultation session is first of a series of similar sessions that build on Kerala’s early lead in FOSS initiatives and serving to consolidate and leverage the lead with international initiatives. The participants of the consultation, representing a cross-section of stakeholders from the Government, technology organizations, institutions of Higher Education, NGOs, and the FOSS community, outlined their vision for the future of FOSS in their respective domains, highlighting gaps and limitations to be resolved, and making suggestions on the way ahead.
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If you are not satisfied or want more options for PlayBook twitter clients here is a new one called Lemma. The application is free and offers quite a few options. The creators also said they created the app as a proof of concept to show the PlayBook potential. They promise to release the source code so that the BlackBerry development community can keep improving the app. So far the app has received good reviews from PlayBook users.
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The site, which is run by the US-based company Geeknet, lists Open Source software broken down in various categories such as ‘Audio & Video’ or ‘Graphics’. All told, there are more than 300,000 programs available for download on the site, which also includes short summaries about the applications and the developers. The site also allows programmers the chance to manage their projects.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It’s been almost two weeks now since the release of Firefox 6, and there’s no doubt it has a number of compelling advantages to recommend it.
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Project Releases
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Hard-core journalists appear to have put all their scepticism aside and wallowed in trying to outdo each other in superlatives.
The emotional tributes give Jobs the credit for anything and everything that Apple has ever done, especially its achievements in the noughties.
The reality is a bit different. And if one strikes a sour note, there are no apologies – this is not a reality TV show where selective reality is played out. No, this is life and the warts and sores are as real as the plastic and the botox.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The British government has applied a blanket ban on all kind of marches and protest gatherings in London amid fears of violence and disorder.
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Cablegate
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Kenya continues to lose millions of shillings in corrupt payments to Anglo Leasing companies, according to a new cable by online whistleblower, WikiLeaks.
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Chief of Mission of the US Interest Section in Havana, Jonathan Farrar, monitored the Internet for possible subversive actions, according to a cable released by Wikileaks and reproduced by Cuban websites on Saturday.
Farrar’s monitoring of the Internet along with his wife occurred in August 2008, when he addressed a memorandum to the US State Department described as sensitive, without reporting any obstacle from Cuban authorities.
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More than two years after it was completed, Sir Robin Auld’s complete Commission of Inquiry Report 2008-09 of alleged corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands government has been made public.
“I believe that the people of the Turks and Caicos Islands deserve to see the entirety of the final report,” His Excellency the Gov. Gordon Wetherell said Aug. 19 in one of his last actions before leaving office and the country Aug. 22.
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Finance
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Conventional wisdom in legal circles has long held that Goldman Sachs (GS.N) might escape further large fines or criminal charges for its role in the 2007-2009 financial crisis after reaching a $550 million settlement with securities regulators in July 2010.
But news that Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and other senior executives have hired their own lawyers — separate from the army of attorneys already retained by the company — was a powerful reminder for markets that Goldman is still the subject of myriad investigations.
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Across the country on September 1, nurses will converge on local congressional offices to demand a tax on Wall Street financial speculation, a move they say is a step towards healing the nation, trimming the deficit, and preserving social programs.
National Nurses United (NNU) is planning a day of action in over 60 congressional offices in 21 states. In Wisconsin, the group is sponsoring a soup kitchen outside of Rep. Paul Ryan’s Janesville office “to provide residents with the sustenance they are not getting from Paul Ryan,” says NNU spokesman Charles Idelson.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In 2010 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it were exposed as a major funder of front groups spreading denial of climate change science and a key backer of efforts to roll back environmental, labor, and health protections at the state and federal levels. Through enormous campaign contributions, an army of lobbyists, and funding of think tanks and front groups, David and Charles Koch push their agenda of a world in which their company can operate without regard for the risks they pose to communities, workers, and the environment. This report, Toxic Koch: Keeping Americans at risk of a Poison Gas Disaster, examines how Koch Industries has quietly played a key role in blocking yet another effort to protect workers and vulnerable communities; comprehensive chemical security legislation.
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Forty years ago today, on August 23, 1971, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., an attorney from Richmond, Virginia, drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that describes a strategy for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society.
Powell and his friend Eugene Sydnor, then-chairman of the Chamber’s education committee, believed the Chamber had to transform itself from a passive business group into a powerful political force capable of taking on what Powell described as a major ongoing “attack on the American free enterprise system.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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To recap the decision in the Mp3Tunes case, EMI sued the company for what it said were a number of copyright-infringing features of the service — including that users could “sideload” songs to their online lockers, by transferring them directly from online sources such as Amazon, and that the service “de-duplicated” songs stored on its servers, so users who shared a specific song would simply access one copy instead of having to store two separate copies. As with many similar music-sharing lawsuits, EMI also argued that the simple act of copying a song to a cloud service was an infringement of copyright.
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You’d never know this by watching the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry’s trade organization, which has spent over a decade launching lawsuits against individuals and groups within the United States. And although the RIAA decided to drop its strategy of mass lawsuits back in 2008, it continues to collude with the MPAA to hound ISPs into spying on their users in an effort to fight piracy.
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