Patent stacking against free (libre and gratis) operating systems such as Android
Summary: How Microsoft, Apple, and of course the Microsoft-led Nokia are now working together against the market leader, which is also a Linux success story, built upon Free/libre software
According to this month’s update from the FRAND boosters, “the second phase of the Microsoft v. Motorola RAND breach of contract trial will take place in Judge James L. Robart’s courtroom in Seattle, WA. A jury will decide whether Motorola breached its SSO-related RAND licensing obligations by offering what Microsoft deems “blatantly unreasonable” licensing terms for its 802.11- and H.264-essential patents, and then following up with patent infringement suits.”
This is not the whole story. What this whole Motorola case is about should be recalled. Microsoft sued Motorola after it had failed to get payments for Android. Motorola then sued back and Microsoft took litigation to its back yard, adding litigation aimed at Google. Motorola was partly bought by Google in the interim. Now, according to this update from Pamela Jones, there are yet more filings.
There are a couple of filings in the Seattle Microsoft v. Motorola case to tell you about.
What we generally find in this case is Apple and Microsoft liaising in patent litigation against Google. They try to tax Android and they openly collaborate on it. If anyone should be sued for copying, it is Apple and Microsoft, not Google. As Groklaw recalls, equipped with this link from last month:
We should expect no less from Apple; after all, Steve Jobs said that good artists copy, great artists steal. Apple’s genius isn’t in inventing entirely new technologies. It’s in taking existing technologies and polishing, commercializing, and mainstreaming them.
[...]
Animated wallpapers? Android. Universal multitasking? Android again. The multitasking interface? I’m not the only one who thinks that looks like WebOS. Android has auto-updated apps for years. Car integration is one of BlackBerry’s last great strongholds. iTunes Radio is like Pandora with sales links. I could go on and on.
Apple is sidling with Microsoft, even on search now (the duopoly is aligned against Google). It should be clear that the evidence of collaboration between those two companies is very compelling and strong now. They even appear in their court cases in conjunction.
Sherlock Holmes and the Hounds of the Basket Case: Clues on the trail of Elop, Ballmer and Nokia’s Board
[...]
Elop is the worst CEO of all time, he has personally caused the biggest corporate downfall in the Global Fortune 500 history, after we eliminate management fraud and crimes. For management incompetence Elop is the benchmark. The worst CEO ever. We need not review all his damage, growing smartphone sales turned into history’s fastest collapse. Growing profitable handset business turned into fastest losses ever in this industry. Market share collapse – Nokia was twice as large in market share as the iPhone, four times as big as Samsung’s smartphones when Elop started – and grew more in 2010 than either rival – but now Nokia smartphones (on all of its platforms, combined) is one sixth the size of the iPhone and one tenth the size of Samsung’s smartphones. Nokia share price, Nokia brand value, Nokia loyalty, all destroyed in the past 2 years and four months.
[...]
So with that perspective, that this ship was sinking so badly, no way would any sane Microsoft CEO want to buy it. Not from what it had been to what had been done to it. But now, lets turn to Elop. Elop clearly had pitched the idea to the Nokia Board, that Microsoft would like to buy Nokia. Elop knew Microsoft, Elop knew Ballmer, and Elop could privately talk with Ballmer back home in Seattle, where nobody would even know. As we have since heard, for example, in the summer of 2011, Ballmer and Elop conspired to consider buying RIM ie Blackberry, but decided against it. So they’ve been cooking up these plans for a while.
We do not know exactly when it is that the idea was first brought to the Nokia Board (or it might be out there, if someone has seen news reporting on it, please share in the comments and I’ll update the story). We do know that Elop made a long series of decisions and announcements that were seen as ‘stupid’ and often caused severe drops to Nokia share prices (or stopped the growth of Nokia share price, like with the unveiling of the N9 running MeeGo). Why would an idiot CEO want to stop growth of the share price and actually wish for a decline in the share price? If he had some personal play in the share – illegal obviously, insider trading and manipulating the stock price. Or if he wanted to make Nokia more appealing to a buyer – to Microsoft.
So. Lets examine some of Elop’s decisions now with the prism of ‘would this be in the interests of making Nokia more appealing to Microsoft in an acquisition’.
And the picture becomes very clear. Why call Nokia’s own products bad, when in fact they were not. When in fact they were award-winning, market-dominating and where even Apple would only weeks later agree to pay Nokia in royalties for Nokia patents, not the other way around. Why the Burning Platforms memo? To cause a severe drop in Nokia sales, retail sales support, carrier support, Nokia brand and – Nokia share price? That cannot be in the best interests of Nokia owners (shareholders) or Nokia employees or Nokia partners or suppliers, or Nokia retail channel and carriers, and end-users. Any CEO to release that memo would be a madman – but what if its his intention to make Nokia more appealing to be bought by Microsoft? It did help cause a severe drop in Nokia share price. Together with the stupid announcement of the Windows shift and end of Symbian with no phones to sell – helped push Nokia share price to under half what it had been in less than half a year. A big achievement, if the objective is to get
Nokia ready to be sold to Microsoft?
“Here is more about Nokia’s rating,” wrote a person from Finland, pointing to these articles [1, 2] about Nokia reaffirming its “junk” status. Nokia is selling patents to trolls Microsoft asks Nokia to sell them to. The target is Android, Microsoft is just forming a patent front against Google and Linux. People oughtn’t lose sight of which company originally commissioned this cartel. █
Summary: Microsoft-funded proxies still instrumental in pushing Microsoft’s restricted booting and Microsoft’s patent traps into the kernel of unparalleled ubiquity
Linux needs to remain free of patent extortion and also free to boot on any system. Denial of these properties would render it less free (or not free at all).
Developers at SUSE, the Linux company based in Germany, are working on cryptographic technology to allow the use of both hibernation and kexec by Linux on secure boot-enabled machines, according to Vojtech Pavlik, director of SUSE Labs and head of kernel development at the company.
This is kernel work which mostly helps Microsoft. SUSE spent years doing Microsoft’s work on Linux, by proxy. SUSE gets paid for that. There are many examples that we covered. There is also a “kernel driver that supports both reading and writing for the exFAT filesystem developed by the Microsoft Corporation,” but we struggle to see who is behind it. For quite some time and even last week Microsoft’s partner Tuxera did this and to quote this new report:
If you’ve watched the news lately, you know that last week a Linux developer has released the first ever native Linux kernel module for Microsoft’s exFAT filesystem.
Looking at the project’s page, the developer just has a cryptic username. Who is it that’s promoting this patent trap? Two of us have looked hard to who’s behind this development and struggled to find an answer. Why would someone do this pro-Microsoft job almost anonymously? This is suspicious. Can anyone help us get the name or company behind this exFAT effort?
Postscript: Upon closer examination of the source code (which has a name) and some subsequent Internet searches we found this:
No, that person said it was a fork of the Samsung exFat module, which, after a quick look on google, seems fully proprietary. I.e, not implicitly GPLv2.
I looked at the vFat code, and it’s not the same, so not likely a fork of it.
The code mentions joosun hahn, who seems to work for Samsung.
So all in all, nope, not forever GPL, and most likely illegally distributed.
Samsung has been paying Microsoft for FAT for about 6 years now, so its interest here would be selfish and dangerous. That is, if Samsung is the power behind it at all… maybe it is just its staff coding outside of work. There needs to be more clarity here. █
Summary: An early look at a rebranding and marketing effort from Microsoft; how people are still being forced to use Windows
THE failure which is Vista 8 is worse than the Vista failure and not even AstroTurfing can save it. The man behind it retired early and reportedly got paid a lot of money (like the CFOs [1, 2]) in order not to say negative things. Yes, it’s a payment made specifically to assure this. Microsoft is trying to rebrand this failure “Blue” (think “Mojave”), but critics hate the resultant system. “Final grade: FAIL,” says a super-long review. “We’re done.”
GSSN will not (rightly, of course!) discriminate on the basis of race, religion and all the other things mentioned above. So, why on Earth should they (and, of course, any other equal opportunity employer) discriminate on the basis of one’s software preferences? Could they?
The software mentioned there is not some highly complex product for niche professionals. It is software for the generic, basic daily activities of pretty much every office worldwide. Expert users of LibreOffice and OpenOffice could quickly downgrade themselves to the Microsoft equivalent and still be much more productive than people with only basic skills of just that one suite. What should such users do with that form? Declare that they are only experts of “Other” (=less relevant) software, or “lie”, that is give themselves a rate correctly meaning that they won’t need babysitting just to open a spreadsheet, even if they’ve never used Excel?
Inertia is the only thing, except crime and dirty tricks, which keeps Windows going. The fastest-growing operating system, which is expected to have a billion users (not just activations), is based on Linux. █
Posted in Asia, Patents at 5:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Ransom is not an acceptable business model
Summary: Patents are being used for price-fixing, rendering drugs inaccessible to those who need them the most, sometimes for their very survival
TECHRIGHTS has covered the issue of patents in medicine going back to the site’s very early days, even though there are sites that are dedicated entirely to this issue. A lot of people die because of patents as a business model — a model which the Gates Foundation is promoting for personal gain (profit) in medicine and agriculture.
We recently discussed the US Chamber of Commerce’s incredibly strange statement on the state of India’s IP protection (or lack thereof). The CofC first applauded the success of India’s Bollywood industry, achieved without strong IP protection, before insisting the only way it would survive was by implementing strong IP protection. This, of course, was the CofC advancing its own agenda, despite being faced with evidence to the contrary.
A lot of pressure is being put on India to comply with the interests of megacorporations from the West. They are constantly attacking or buying out generics providers. People actually die in bulk as a result of actions like these.
Doctors Without Borders warned Tuesday that rising intellectual property rights are blocking the generic production of newer drugs to treat HIV and are keeping them out of reach for developing countries.
This is indeed what’s happening. Drugs which cost just a few cents to make are being kept out of the hands of those who need them. This is a cartel, a price-fixing strategy which governments should call illegal as they begin to investigate the perpetrators. This is not just about HIV; many other drugs for other illnesses are being used as tool of ransom. This needs to stop. █
Summary: The anti-copyleft camp grows with new additions and gradually-accumulating evidence from Black Duck, OpenLogic, and Outercurve (Microsoft proxy)
The head of a proprietary software company, not a FOSS proponent by any stretch of imagination, wrote the following article a few days ago. It got published in a high-profile news site:
Open source software is now a massive force in technology today. Yet many of us aren’t aware of the reach and influence open source has on our personal and professional lives.
This was written by the head of Black Duck, a company created by a guy from Microsoft. This is a proprietary software company which collects software patents and defends this practice, too. Another company whose head is from Microsoft says that “Monty Widenius, a primary author of MySQL, argues that typical open source licensing is a problem for entrepreneurs, and that a change is needed.”
Using terms like “commercial license” to mean proprietary he concludes: “Even though OpenLogic provides support to enterprises in tracking and managing open source requests, approvals, policies, and governance, and we could certainly assist in automating processes around “business source” clock expirations, I hope – and expect – the impractical idea of “business source” will die on the vine.”
Remember that Monty worked for Microsoft, even if briefly. The disdain of the GPL there should not be all that shocking.
So basically the above firms don’t promote FOSS, they just provide advice on use of FOSS code. Steven L. Grandchamp, the President and CEO of the latter firm, comes from Microsoft, unlike the CTO. What we generally found is, both of these firms usually advise against copyleft. We gave plenty of examples. These firms are becoming parasites whose main goal is to discourage developers who choose a GPL-like licence. Joining those firms are other Microsoft proxies like Outercurve, which has just gotten itself another person qualified to antagonise copyleft. “Jagielski takes over the role of President from Sam Ramji of Apigee, who held the position for the past three years,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says. His article’s summary is: “The open-source software foundation announced that Jim Jagielski, co-founder of the Apache Foundation and a Red Hat consulting software engineer, would be taking over as its President.”
The predecessor was a malicious mole inside the FOSS community [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] and we can expect Jagielski to serve the Microsoft agenda of ending copyleft and weakening the likes of the FSF.
Those who believe that Microsoft cares about FOSS ought to know that Microsoft cannot stand the “f word” in FOSS. Microsoft is just trying to change FOSS, not embrace it. And at the core Microsoft wants proprietary software like Windows and Excel. It is not hard to see that. The evidence is too strong. █
“I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
Posted in Patents at 4:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Tax money oughtn’t be used to help tax the public with patent monopolies
Government Center in Boston
Summary: Boston University joins the crowd of academic trolls; some news about software patents in general
A few days ago we wrote about one university which turns to patents for money, using litigation as a business model whilst its whole business is based on taxpayers for subsidies. This is truly an injustice — one that nobody should defend on behalf of taxpayers (that’s everyone). As for corporate funding of universities, it usually drives corruption and lies, hence it should be banned, as I stated even half a decade ago. Companies never give money to universities as an act of charity; they would get sued by shareholders if they did, so they clearly want something in return.
“This is truly an injustice — one that nobody should defend on behalf of taxpayers (that’s everyone).”It is now being reported that Boston University exploits patents for the sake of embargo. They are basically trying to impede a producing market, assuming that people whom taxpayers funded are entitled to do this. People should speak out loudly against this because although Apple is the victim here, Android/Linux might be next.
So UC is now joined by the university known for criticising patent trolls [1, 2, 3]. As another article put it, this university itself is now becoming similar to a troll itself. To quote: “Boston University is seeking a ban on all iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air sales based on a patent dating back 22 years ago that runs out in two years.
“Welcome to the ranks of blood-sucking scumbag patent trolls, Boston University. You’re in good company — Nathan Myrvold is the president of the club.
“Ironically, it was Boston University professors James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer who completed a study last year that concluded that patent trolls — organizations that develop or acquire patentable technologies but don’t produce any products — cost the United States a cool $29 billion a year.
“The troll in this case may have as well acquired some patents that innocently got accumulated by academics, hence they should not be permitted to pursue patents in the first place.”“Oh, that’s before various indirect costs such as “diversion of resources, delays in new products, and loss of market share,” the Boston University profs said at the time, adding that “we find little evidence that NPEs [nonproducing entities, aka patent trolls] promote invention overall.”
“I wonder what they think of their university now.”
Indeed.
It is worth highlighting that an area I worked in personally, the task of identity verification (research funded by the ERC, i.e. European taxpayers), is now the target of other patent litigation, this time with a patent troll behind it (where did the patents originally come from?). To quote: “A patent-holding company hit Toshiba America Inc. with an electronics security patent infringement suit in Delaware federal court Tuesday over facial-recognition software used in its Qosmio line of laptops.”
“Sometimes we find that Intellectual Ventures sweeps up universities’ patents and then passes them for a shell company to sue producing companies.”What this usually involves is filters and matrices i.e. pure mathematics. The application in this case is usually access control, not surveillance. This is useful in an airport for example, where machines are increasingly being used to compare passport photos with the person travelling (to assure no deception). The troll in this case may have as well acquired some patents that innocently got accumulated by academics, hence they should not be permitted to pursue patents in the first place. Those who are assembling demand letters from trolls will hopefully expand to documenting which shell company is owned or run by who, e.g. Intellectual Ventures. Moreover, the original source of the patents being used by trolls would be worth investigating, Sometimes we find that Intellectual Ventures sweeps up universities’ patents and then passes them for a shell company to sue producing companies. Watch patent lawyers like Fox Rothschild LLP celebrating a recent CAFC ruling that legitimises software patents [1, 2, 3]. █
Last week you had a chance to ask Jon “maddog” Hall about his work on Project Caua and FOSS in general. Below you’ll find his answers to those questions.
In some circles systemd took a real beating, while others like it. Just about anytime the subject of systemd arises, a bit of shouting match develops. But as developers defend the shift to systemd, I wondered what regular users thought. So, of course, I ran a poll.
In an attempt to get a general idea of how users felt, I simply asked “systemd” with the following answer choices:
BeyondTrust, a provider of Context-Aware Security Intelligence, announced the release of PowerBroker UNIX & Linux 7.5, which now includes tight integration with the company’s vulnerability management platform, Retina CS.
A second SSD caching framework and support for the new Radeons’ video decoder are two of the most important enhancements in Linux 3.10, which is now out. This version also includes several new and improved drivers and a change to the network stack to speed up HTTP connections.
The third major milestone release for the Linux kernel in 2013 is now available. Linux 3.10 The new release follows the previous Linux 3.9 kernel release by just over two months.
Recent Intel-based systems often implement something called Intel Rapid Start Technology. Like many things with the word “Technology” in the name, there’s a large part of this that’s marketing. The relatively small amount of technical documentation available implies that it’s tied to your motherboard chipset and CPU, but as far as I can tell it’s entirely implemented in firmware and could work just as well on, say, a Cyrix on a circa 1996 SIS-based motherboard if someone wrote the BIOS code[1]. But since nobody has, we’re stuck with the vendors who’ve met Intel’s requirements and licensed the code.
After talking about the big DRM changes heading for the Linux 3.11 kernel, the Nouveau DRM driver changes are finally known as they were pulled into the drm-next tree last night.
While the AMD Radeon DRM driver changes are exciting with dynamic power management and Sea Islands support, and the Intel driver has an assortment of good stuff, the Nouveau driver sadly isn’t too exciting. The pull for the Linux 3.11 kernel still doesn’t have Fermi/Kepler re-clocking or any other major changes to the Nouveau driver.
Sometimes, less really is more. Case in point: Guayadeque. Compared with most music players for Linux, this lightweight player manages to offer much more in the way of useful features. For example: Guayadeque offers an impressive array of fine-tuning possibilities. In fact, this is one area that truly separates Guayadeque from the rest of the music-playing pack.
The easiest way to write online might not be the best choice. If you are serious about building your online identity, putting your faith in a single companies platform puts you at risk of that company changing priorities, moving in a direction you no longer agree with, or just going away completely. The best way to go about building a site to last is to build it in a way that you can move it from place to place, server to server, with as little interruption as possible. This is what Pelican gives you, an open source tool that generates a static site you can upload to any server or cloud hosting provider.
The growing company joined the Linux Foundation in May as it seeks to advance the gaming industry. And it’s off to a great start, having shipped more than 15 titles since 1998, including the armored World of Tanks and World of Warplanes, a free-to-play flight combat game. Wargaming is now expanding to a new mobile platform and continues to hire developers as it opens offices across the globe.
Here, Melnikau discusses how Wargming uses Linux; the company’s hardware setup; gaming on Linux; his advice to game developers; and openings at the company.
Between the original 1979 movie and the iconic Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior in the US) two years later there is a large leap of story line, but there are constants between the surreal setting of Max’s revenge tale and the post-apocalyptic world of the spectacular sequel. Mainly it was that black ’73 Falcon XB GT in the role of Pursuit Special V8 Interceptor.
Today Zero Point Software released Interstellar Marines on Steam Early Access. It’s still in Pre-Alpha state but many features are available right now. For now it will only support Windows and Mac, but support for Linux is on roadmap and should be available soon.
Qt 4.8.5, the latest stable version of Qt in 4.8.x branch has been released and it fixes over 400 bugs and security holes. As this is a patch release, no new features have been added and its designed to maintain full compatability with earlier releases of Qt 4.x. Upgradation to this release is highly recommended as it closes some major security issues and makes the environment more stable and reliable.
Ooooh, you’re a KDE user was what I got this morning from one young tech guy in the office, most of the Linux users I work with are XFCE lovers. I’m partial to a bit of Unity or Gnome 3 because I’ve had my fingers burnt too many times with previous KDE releases being buggy and unstable.
Swedish Animation and VFX studio Mad Crew has chosen for Krita, taking advantage of KO GmbH’s new professional support offering. While for many artists, Krita is a great choice out of the box, in a production setting having dedicated support can be really important.
Unlike to what we had initially planned, we decided to start working on the rendering of the ground overlays, since it would eventually interact with the OpenGL project developed by René Küttner and Bernhard Beschow.
While there already is a second beta release of KDE 4.11, the next development cycle of the KDE Software Compilation, the team released their final increment (stability and bugfix release) of the 4.10 cycle today.
Today KDE released updates for its Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. These are the latest in the series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 releases. The 4.10.5 updates contain many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone running the 4.10 release series.
Since I installed Pisi Linux Beta 2, I’ve been using it steadily. So far, I haven’t experienced any crashes. That’s great! I also installed the updates (quite a few, indeed) that my system showed.
DoudouLinux is specially designed for children to make computer use as easy and pleasant as possible for them, while taking care of children self-fulfillment. DoudouLinux provides tens of applications that suit children from 2 to 12 years old and gives them an environment as easy to use as a gaming console. Kids can learn, discover and have fun without Dad and Mum always watching!
Rendering performance has been improved on CPU and GPU and support for new GPUs was added. A new Mist render pass is available, Ray visibility is now supported for all light sources, and new Nodes have been added. Hair rendering on the GPU has been enabled as well.
The Fedora project has announced the release of Fedora 19 aka Schrödinger’s Cat. Fedora teams lead the development of some of the core upstream projects which are then used by other distros such as Ububuntu.
It’s been another exciting Tuesday in the Open Source world. Fedora dominated headlines today with the release of version 19. Hot on their heals is the Korora Project with their version 19. With such bounty, how can one choose?
In a nod to fans of classic desktop interfaces, the new Fedora includes a MATE variant and classic mode for GNOME. Systemd now takes care of containers and assigning network names. New drivers support 3D acceleration in newer Radeon graphics cards.
In Part One we learned that installing Debian 7 definitely isn’t rocket science–anybody can do it! Now that we have our Debian system installed and our computer is booting into the world of Debian Linux, let’s take a look and discover our new computing environment.
Canonical, the company behind the open source Ubuntu Linux OS, set out earlier this year to create a radically new video display platform called Mir to help it steal a slice of the smartphone and tablet markets. Now, in a sign of just how serious the company is, it has announced a hiring push for developers to work on Mir and related projects.
Canonical are looking for Juju developers to create new tools that use its service orchestration framework and is prepared to offer $10,000 to the best Charm in each of three categories. The company is looking for entries that can construct a full high-availability service stack in the “High Availability” category, can implement “big data” mining and analysis in the “Data Mining” category or can assemble monitoring infrastructure for existing services in the “Monitoring” category.
In the first article in the series I gave a whistlestop tour of Ubuntu 13.04 which gave a brief overview of the functionality within Ubuntu. In the second article i demonstrated the functionality of the Unity Launcher. This article is all about the Dash within Unity and includes details about lenses, filters and previews.
The best way to get some attention for your DevOps platform and open source system is to put some money behind it. Ubuntu’s Juju was designed to be a free and open source sandbox for develops can build and deploy Juju Charms (distilled apps recipes, as Ubuntu noted), and now there’s a contest for Juju developers to strut their stuff and possibly win $10,000. That is, if they can develop the best Juju Charm.
Peppermint is super proud this week to appear in the Local Economy section of Asheville, North Carolina’s most trustworthy news source, Mountain Xpress. After three years of appearing on Lifehacker, Geek.com, ZDnet and our software riding front cover on the likes of Linux Format and Linux User, it’s an amazing feeling to get some hometown recognition and love.
Back in the good old days, PC desktops were huge, and yes, quite literally took up an entire desktop, or at least good amount of foot space if you configured it as a tower.
It’s been confirmed by Samsung’s Executive Vice President Lee Young Hee that Samsung’s smartwatch is indeed a real thing and it has been in development for quite a while, as rumors speculated. We don’t have any further news or details regarding the smart watch, even the picture you see is an artist’s rendering of the device. However, the recent trademark filing ‘Samsung GEAR’ raises suspicions that it might just be the name of the device, a couple of trademark filings and a look at their documents have hinted the possibility.
Intrinsyc announced the availability of a hardware/software development kit for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 system-on-chip. The DragonBoard 8074 Development Kit for the 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 includes a Qseven-compliant computer-on-module (COM) and a Mini-ITX baseboard, and is supported with Android 4.2.
In the modern server space, Intel’s x86 has dominated for at least the last decade. It’s an area where ARM-based servers could soon take a slice of that pie.
AdaCore has announced that it is making its commercial GNAT Pro Ada development environment available for the embedded Wind River Linux platform. The development kit can be used to write application modules in Ada and combine them freely with C and C++ modules. Due to tight integration between GNAT Pro and Wind River Linux, Ada applications can then be analysed and manipulated through Wind River’s tools and working environment. GNAT Pro on Wind River Linux supports all versions of Ada – from Ada 83 up to the most recent Ada 2012.
Following several days of rumors that the release of Samsung’s first Tizen-based smartphone had been delayed, the Korean language website i24news.com reported today that Samsung officials have stated that the launch of the company’s first Tizen device is being pushed out by two months.
Google is grappling with an ongoing antitrust case in Europe over its online search business, and if its rivals have anything to do with it, that might extend into Google’s power in the mobile sphere, too. Figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel may not help Google’s case very much. The analysts say that in the last three months, Google-powered smartphones, running Android, accounted for more than 70% of sales in the region’s five biggest markets of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain — part of a wider, global trend of Android continuing to consolidate its leadership position in smartphones. And the secondary story here is that much of this success is being led by Samsung, which now accounts for nearly half of all smartphones sold in the region.
We are getting lots of leaked evidences of existence of HTC One Mini, the smaller sibling of the flagship HTC One. We have got new leaked photos of the alleged HTC One Mini that are floating online.
We were left disappointed when Google did not announce any new Nexus device at the Google IO, especially announcement about next Nexus 7 device was much anticipated. Suddenly we have some information about the specs and release date of the 2nd generation Nexus 7, spilled by an Asus representative.
Motorola has been quiet since a long time, while Samsung, Sony and HTC have been busy launching their flagship devices with lot of fanfare. However, suddenly a page has surfaced on the Motorola official website that has confirmed the existence of the ULTRA line of phones.
The developers who have been working to bring the Ubuntu Linux operating system to smartphones and tablets have released the first builds that don’t have to load Android before they can boot into Ubuntu.
Nokia’s turmoils and subsequent mass layoffs have freed up plenty of smart people in the Finnish workforce to do their own thing. Rovio with Angry Birds, Jolla with Sailfish and now Adaia. The 16-person startup, led by former Nokia employee Heikki Sarajärvi, has revealed that it plans to launch a range of premium Android handsets at some point in 2014 in the US, UK and of course, Finland. By premium, we’re looking at anywhere between $1,300 to $6,500, in return for the promise of extra ruggedness and durability as well as potential satellite connectivity. Why Android? Heikki says “there is no alternative,” something we assume Stephen Elop would strongly disagree with.
After much deliberation, the government has decided to continue the much-troubled Aakash project and has released the specifications of the fourth-gen low-cost education tablet. These are the proposed specifications for the device, which will officially be called Aakash 4.
After almost 10 years in open source, Robin Muilwijk is still fighting the misconceptions that come with working in the industry. He says the toughest part is finding the right balance between openness while continuing to promote the open source way of doing business.
These are the words of Rob Lith, business development director at Connection Telecom, who adds that adopting an open approach to software engineering has become more popular.
“In today’s operating system market, for example, Android leads with 42% share, and Apple is second with 24%,” he says, pointing out that Android is OSS, and Apple’s OS X has an integrated version of FreeBSD, an OSS operating system.
“I want the same clout as Oracle. I just don’t want that same infrastructure as Oracle. Open sourcing is a great way to teach people how to write code, see how things work, and get contributions and get people to trust it. It is marketing as well, however. It is a lot of things. Just one thing is missing: It is not a very clean way to make money.”
Most open source projects start by scratching the developer’s own itch. They then spread to other developers based on functionality and stability, and the responsiveness of the community.
Recent browser benchmarks are showing surprising results: in ‘a geometric mean of all four performance-based categories: Wait Times, JavaScript/DOM, HTML5/CSS3, and Hardware Acceleration,’ Firefox 22 ‘pulls off an upset, replacing the long-time performance champion Google Chrome 27 as the new speed king.’
One year after its launch, RollApp has raised $1 million of funding to build out its platform for running Windows and Linux apps on any device with a web browser (yes, even the iPad).
Microsoft has been enjoying some success recently, as Windows 8 finally starts to grab more market share, but it may surprise some people to learn that a huge portion of the company’s revenues come from the Microsoft Office suite of applications, which many offices standardize on for compatibility reasons. As good as the free, open productivity suites have become, they still tend not to be totally compatible with applications like Word and Excel.
Almost two years after open source software development initiative Mozilla first announced plans to build its own Web-based mobile operating system, Firefox OS finally reached consumers this week with the launch of the ZTE Open. Rolling out in Spain in partnership with carrier giant Telefónica, the ZTE Open boasts core services like voice calling, text messaging, email, Web browsing and a camera, as well as built-in social features like Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Twitter integration, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Here maps and access to Firefox Marketplace, which offers HTML5-based apps across a range of categories. It’s also dirt cheap: About $90. “Now there’s no price reason not to own a smartphone,” HIS Screen Digest analyst Ian Fogg tweeted.
Mozilla’s latest open source release isn’t a browser, a mobile OS, or an email client. It’s not even software. It’s the Foundation’s new office in Japan. Everything within its walls is open source and available to be downloaded, copied, and remixed like so much free code.
For years now, open source browsers–led by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome–have been setting the pace of innovation. Ask many people which browser is the fastest, and they’ll instantly say Google Chrome, but Firefox version 22–released only days ago–actually takes the performance crown in Tom’s Hardware’s latest round of browser tests, which are always rigorous. In addition, the underlying engines of popular browsers are heading in some surprising directions.
According to the Tom’s Hardware tests, Firefox’s new version 22 wins against Chrome version 27 in a lot of key performance tests, including average startup times across hot and cold scenarios.
As Mozilla’s Firefox OS arrives in new phones, it’s grabbing lots of headlines and faring well in hands-on tests, which bodes well for the mobile operating system that Mozilla is aligning its entire organization around. I’ve written before that I think goodwill toward Mozilla and open source will make Firefox OS phones early successes.
Imagine 15,000 people, all desperately wanting to use your product – so much so that they take time out of their day to sign a petition. That’s the case for Google: a Change.org petition demanding a Linux version of Google Drive is rapidly approaching its goal of 15,000 signatures.
LibreOffice is essential to the Linux desktop. However, it is also burdened by useless baggage—features that are hopelessly obsolete today and should never be used by anyone hoping to create an impression.
I’m not talking about features like master documents in Writer that have become less useful as the average amount of RAM on a workstation has risen into the gigabytes. Nor am I talking about the interface, which, although serviceable, is decidedly uninspired. Still less am I talking about features such as the fields for hidden text or paragraphs that have only a handful of users but remain essential for rare yet sophisticated purposes.
Rather, I am talking about features that make users look clueless—features that encourage typographical nightmares of illegibility or excess. Some of these features look as though they might date to LibreOffice’s first incarnation as StarWriter in 1984, because they result in the kind of excess that people used to commit when office suites were new. Certainly, in the decade that Sun Microsystems oversaw the code, very little was done to update it with the result that much of the code has a nineties-like look to it.
The 14th edition of the International Forum on Free Software FISL 14, from July 3rd to 6th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will carry several LibreOffice and OpenDocument Formats (ODF) activities. This year, the good news are the participation of Italo Vignoli (Italy) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Germany) who will talk on the adoption of open standards and free software, respectively. Italo will present a lecture on LibreOffice: the History and A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards. Bjoern will conduct the LibreOffice Workshop and will give the lecture LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved and LibreOffice – Continuous community integration.
Some transport plugins may want to include additional flags or options in the transport addresses. For example the HTTPS plugin may want to set a flag that a peer has a valid SSL certificate and that a peer can enable client-side certificate validation. To do so we extended all existing transport plugins to add a 32-bit field in their addresses to support this functionality.
GNU Paint is switching to git, starting from the Debian pkg-gpaint git repo as a base. Immediate work will be to port the existing code to gtk+ 3. Later plans are moving the code base to vala and to make use of GEGL
Über-developer Robin Gareus has worked for a couple of years to add video support to Ardour, and with this release, we are pleased to finally enable it. In addition there are a couple of new features (including the ability to chain MIDI processing plugins) and the usual assorted list of bug fixes.
Today, the Free Software Foundation Europe publishes its Free Software related election questions for this fall’s elections to the German parliament, which will take place on September 22. All political parties have responded to the questions, which cover issues like users’ control over their electronic devices, the release of publicly funded computer programs as Free Software, and software patents.
While there is a open source alternative for almost every useful closed program out there, open source hardware are however rare. Parallella which started earlier as a Kickstarter campaign to create a really cheap, reliable supercomputer for masses, had promised earlier that they will make their hardware open source. The campaign is now over and now it seems that they have fulfilled their promise.
Parallella is a low cost supercomputer designed by Adapteva using Xilinx Zynq-7010/7020 FPGA+2x Cortex A9 SoC combined with Adapteva Ephipany 16 or 64 cores epiphany coprocessor. The project had a successful kickstarter campaign which allowed then to provide the 16-core version for $99, and the 64-core version for $750. The board will soon be shipped to people who pledged on kickstarter, and one of the promise of the campaign was to fully open source the platform, and today, they just fulfilled that.
A court in Turkey has scrapped a controversial plan to redevelop Istanbul’s Gezi Park that sparked protests which snowballed into deadly nationwide unrest, media reported on Wednesday.
A new research project is using visualization techniques to tell us more about the world using our Instagram uploads. Phototrails explores the “visual patterns, dynamics, and structures” of over 2 million images shared on the popular photo-sharing service, helping researchers map the behavior of people in 13 cities across the globe.
Scientists demonstrated that the D-Wave processor housed at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics has a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip’s 128 qubits.
Science—and the culture of evidence and inquiry it supports—has a long relationship with democracy. Widely available facts have long served as a check on political power. Attacks on science, and on the ability of scientists to communicate freely, are ultimately attacks on democratic governance.
It’s no secret the Harper government has a problem with science. In fact, Canada’s scientists are so frustrated with this government’s recent overhaul of scientific communications policies and cuts to research programs they took to the streets, marching on Parliament Hill last summer to decry the “Death of Evidence.” Their concerns— expressed on their protest banners—followed a precise logic: “no science, no evidence, no truth, no democracy.”
If you’ve used a mouse to click this article, you can thank Douglas Engelbart. The longtime inventor passed away in the late hours of July 2 at his home in Atherton, California. He was 88 years old.
In addition to inventing the computer mouse, Engelbart helped develop other technologies that have become commonplace in the computing world, including pioneering hypertext, networking, and the early stages of graphical user interfaces. He will always be one of the giants of Silicon Valley.
New evidence has emerged suggesting that the entire global supply of rice may have already been contaminated by unapproved, genetically-modified (GM) rice varieties manufactured by the American multinational corporation Bayer CropScience. A recent entry in the GM Contamination Register explains that between the years of 2006 and 2007, three different varieties of illegal GM rice, none of which have ever been approved for cultivation or consumption anywhere in the world, were identified in more than 30 countries worldwide.
A video aired on KTLA shows police in Hawthorne, California shooting and killing a dog after arresting a man who was filming them. According to police, the dog’s owner, Leon Rosby, was allegedly interfering with the crime scene and blasting music after police asked him to stop. The video does not show the altercation police say led to Rosby’s arrest. In video footage that is available, Rosby does not appear to be disrupting the crime scene, only filming it. Rosby put his dog in a car before he was arrested. After Rosby was handcuffed, however, his dog jumped out of the car window and approached the police officers, who shot and killed the dog.
In a 2001 article for the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, the legal scholar and civil liberties activist Roger Roots posed just that question. Roots, a fairly radical libertarian, believes that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow for police as they exist today. At the very least, he argues, police departments, powers and practices today violate the document’s spirit and intent. “Under the criminal justice model known to the framers, professional police officers were unknown,” Roots writes.
High-ranking officers in the United States military are being replaced by the Obama administration and for a number of dubious reasons. The latest is General John Allen, who was embroiled in the Petraeus affair.
Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, whose 2011 meltdowns dislocated 160,000 people, may provide a new blueprint for terrorists seeking to inflict mass disruption, security analysts said at a United Nations meeting.
Cold, emotionless, and unforgiving police in Hawthorne, CA, shot the dog of a peaceful man who was filming the police, one out of many people filming who happened to be nearest to the police. Not only that, but for trying to hold the police accountable, he was arrested after his dog was slaughtered.
What we are seeing in Egypt is counter-revolution pure and simple, military hardliners who are going to be friendly with Israel and the US, and are committing gross human rights abuse.
The Egyptian military’s overthrow of elected President Mohammed Morsi left President Barack Obama grappling with a difficult question of diplomacy and language in dealing with the Arab world’s most populous nation: was it a coup?
At stake as Obama and his aides wrestle with that question in the coming days is the $1.5 billion in aid the United States sends to Cairo each year — almost all of it for the military — as well as the president’s views on how best to promote Arab democracy.
Egypt’s army would suspend the constitution and dissolve the parliament under a draft political road-map to be pursued if President Mohamed Morsi and the liberal opposition fail to agree by Wednesday, military sources told Reuters.
Unmanned US aircraft fired four missiles at a house in north-west Pakistan today, killing 16 suspected militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said.
“The last two governments dealt with this dilemma by protesting in public while approving the attacks in private. Thanks to WikiLeaks, the public knows,” wrote Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in al-Jazeera.
A U.S. drone strike killed at least 17 people in Pakistan’s restive border region early on Wednesday, Pakistani security officials said, in the biggest such attack this year, and the second since Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took office.
Security officials told AFP that Afghan and Pakistani militants were among the dead at the compound in the town of Miranshah, but that there was no immediate confirmation of any high-value target.
Pakistan on Wednesday lodged a strong protest against the recent drone strikes in North Waziristan that killed 18 persons, and demanded to end them on immediate basis, Geo News reported Wednesday.
The drone strike elicited a swift condemnation by the Pakistani government, which released a statement saying the strikes are a violation of its sovereignty.
Lord Ashdown, the former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina has said huge amounts of arms have flooded into Syria from stocks left over from the Bosnian war, funded by the Qatari regime with help from the CIA. VoR’s Vivienne Nunis reports.
Though news coverage of President Barack Obama’s selection of Avril Haines as the new deputy director of the CIA has been slim, there are many retired and active intelligence officers living in Brevard County who should take note of this appointment.
Former NSA, CIA director Gen Hayden said Snowden’s leaks highlight ‘balance between privacy and security’ debate, but law professors call NSA mass surveillance ‘criminal.’
Drone strikes — billed by President Barack Obama as tactically surgical and less deadly to civilians than conventional air power — are 10 times more likely to cause innocent casualties than bombs or missiles unleashed from U.S. jets, according to a new study based on classified military documents.
A polarised Egypt is facing the most critical phase of its post-revolutionary life after Egypt’s army ousted the country’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi, and scheduled fresh elections in a what was labelled by the presidency as a “full coup”.
The chief of the armed forces, General Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, announced that he had suspended the constitution and would nominate the head of the constitutional court, Adli Mansour, as interim president on Thursday. Both presidential and parliamentary elections would follow shortly afterwards and a transitional cabinet would be named.
One of the most riveting moments in the George Zimmerman trial this week was the playing of a police tape that showed Zimmerman re-enacting what he said happened the night he fatally shot Trayvon Martin.
Two survivors of a dinghy tragedy that killed 63 migrants in the Mediterranean lodged fresh legal complaints today in Paris and Madrid, accusing the French and Spanish military of failing to come to the aid of people in danger.
After the drones finally left the area and it was safe to recover the corpses, family members discovered the small, charred remains of another fatality of the strike: It was Saleh’s brother, Abdulaziz, a 10-year-old boy.
A new study has found that the use of drones in Afghanistan resulted in 10 times more civilian deaths than manned aircraft. The study was conducted by Larry Lewis, a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, and Sarah Holewinsk of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. The report used classified military data to calculate the number of civilian deaths caused by drones as opposed to manned fighter aircraft.
An expert on drone casualties has told reporters that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles by American forces has caused 10 times the number of deaths brought on by more conventional aircraft.
Afghan army chief of staff General Sher Mohammad Karimi told the BBC in an interview that Pakistan could end the Afghan war “in weeks” if it were serious about peace and is complicit in drone strikes despite its denunciations of the anti-militant campaign.
Locals of the area observed the worst kind of terror and fear as four missiles exploded with big bangs in the thickly populated residential area of Serai Darapa Khel.
For almost three years, US financial giants VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, the Bank of America and Western Union have been engaged in an unlawful banking blockade against WikiLeaks. The blockade started in December 2010 in response to the start of WikiLeaks’ publication of US diplomatic cables.
This is yet another video of a citizen confronting a police officer about his taking her iPad because she was using it to film him in the course of a stop or arrest. The officer tells her that she can pick it up tomorrow and that she is risking an arrest by continuing to confront him.
Following his recent trip to Africa, President Obama has been lauding his new ‘Power Africa’ program, which he claims will funnel money and resources to “double access to power in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Yet, the money the U.S. government is throwing at the program will in fact be pumped into U.S.-based multinational corporations.
Should ecosystems have legally enforceable rights? It might sound like a ridiculous idea, but a global debate on this is in full swing. The Constitution of Ecuador now recognises rights of nature. Environmental activists have called for a “United Natures” to replace the “United Nations”. And New Zealand has given “personhood” to the Whanganui River to help protect it.
Who would have thought the future of the environment was some kind of joke? It turns out comedians actually seem to care more about climate change than the people who produce real news programs do.
It’d be nice if newspapers covered policy fights as if reality mattered. But corporate media generally prefers to cover politics as a form of public relations–which involves the creation of a reality that you think will help your side win.
The whales often change their diving behavior and avoid feeding areas after they hear the underwater sonar often used during military exercises, a Duke University press release stated.
The first round of talks in the giant Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal are due to begin next week but the latest NSA spying claims have thrown negotiations into doubt.
European Union officials have expressed outrage at the NSA for bugging embassies of a US allies including France, Japan and Turkey.
“We can’t negotiate a large transatlantic market if there is any doubt that our partners are bugging the offices of European negotiators,” warned EU commissioner Viviane Reding.
But back in 2011, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, France and not China or Russia, was found to be the country that conducted the most industrial espionage on other European countries. WikiLeaks also revealed that the spying network was so widespread that “damages it caused the German economy were larger as a whole than those caused by China or Russia.”
Following the introduction of restrictions against file-sharing services, Mastercard and Visa have now started to take action against VPN providers. This week, Swedish payment provider Payson cut access to anonymizing services after being ordered to do so by the credit card companies. VPN provider iPredator is one of the affected customers and founder Peter Sunde says that they are considering legal action to get the service unblocked.
As cities and states struggle to raise revenue in a sagging economy, they have increasingly turned control of public services and assets over to for-profit corporations. But these short-term efforts to close budget gaps can have a disastrous long-term impact.
You don’t have to wait very long nowadays before this or that euro zone luminary declares the currency bloc’s long crisis at an end, of concern only to historians.
Oh, for sure, there are residual niggles, like the fact that nearly one in three Spanish workers has no job or that growth seems to have permanently abandoned the euro zone’s periphery. But never mind, the euro’s existential turmoil is finished. The euro is forever, whatever other ideas those dastardly speculators in the bond and currency markets might once have had.
A group that promotes the digital currency Bitcoin has thrown down the gauntlet with regulators, telling California officials that selling the digital currency does not require a state money transmitter license.
In a July 1 letter to the California Department of Financial Institutions, lawyers for the Bitcoin Foundation also clarified that the nonprofit does not itself sell bitcoins to consumers or run an exchange. But even if it did, such activity would not be regulated in California, the foundation says, arguing that selling bitcoins does not meet the state law’s definition of “money transmission.”
On college campuses across the United States, the eternal optimism of youth has been throttled out by a fear of crushing student debt. That’s certainly the case in Oregon, where the cost of tuition has soared as public funding for higher education has declined.
Even as unemployment has gradually declined, the child poverty rate has been on the rise, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Between 2010 and 2011, the number of children living in poverty rose from 15.7 million to 16.4 million. The child poverty rate also rose from 19 to 23 percent from 2005 to 2011, representing an increase of 3 million children.
A blogger for The New York Times has been requesting thousands of dollars in “expenses” and travel airfare from a public relations firm trying to get its clients covered in the Times, according to emails obtained by Gawker.
The Center for Media and Democracy filed a complaint yesterday with the Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure Commission alleging that Nebraska Senator Jim Smith, a major proponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, failed to disclose significant travel expenses paid for by the Government of Alberta, Canada during Smith’s participation in an “Oil Sands Academy” organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The trip was sponsored by the operator of the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada, which may raise additional concerns under the ethics and lobbying code.
Okay, well, here’s the obvious response: Digital Citizens Alliance Executive Director Tom Galvin has allowed bogus, censorious, anti-innovation screeds to be sent by states’ attorneys general. Worse, they have promoted this FUD-filled exercise with PR spam blasts to reporters trying to generate bogus faux-moral panics to promote their own anti-innovation agenda. Hopefully, the public and reporters will be able to get answers that others have failed to get. Namely, why such an obvious bullshit astroturfing group is putting anti-innovation, anti-free speech policies into the mouths of states attorneys general, and doing so in a manner that only leads to it being more difficult for law enforcement to track down actual criminals. When the Digital Citizens Alliance finally takes steps to ensure that it stops these bogus moral panics in targeting third parties and driving the actual crimes further underground, the internet will be a safer place.
But Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and even Instagram are all, guess what, media outlets–that is, institutions whose primary purpose is to distribute information to the public. (Their names appear in bold in FAIR materials because we bold the names of media outlets.)
They disseminate information gathered by their users; the medium they use to do so is known collectively as “social media.” The fact that “social media” doesn’t appear in Durbin’s “broadly defined” list of media is irrelevant–Durbin doesn’t present his list as exclusive. (That’s why he says “including.”) It’s hard to think of a definition of “medium” that would exclude Facebook and include, say, nonfiction book publishing–which in the 21st Century can be as hands-off as publishing a social media post (e.g., via Amazon’s Kindle store).
The final part of Durbin’s definition is that the information is disseminated for public use–which is a simple matter of privacy settings on most social media sites.
A shadowy, self-described “patriot” hacktivist has launched a series of cyberattacks against Ecuador and says he plans to direct a similar onslaught against any country considering granting asylum to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The hacker, who calls himself the “th3J35t3r” (the Jester) and in the past has identified himself as a former soldier, has also taken aim at Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been assisting Snowden in his efforts to seek safe haven.
This Fourth of July, groups of concerned individuals will be taking to the streets in dozens of cities across the United States in support of the Fourth Amendment. According to the official website, Restore the Fourth aims to end all forms of unconstitutional surveillance of digital communications by the United States government. The campaign calls particular attention to PRISM, a recently-revealed project of the National Security Agency that allows the government broad access to the Internet traffic and other electronic communications of many users – including many Americans. The Restore the Fourth movement has an active reddit community that is working cooperatively to organize protests across the country.
The geopolitical storm churned up by Edward J. Snowden, the fugitive American intelligence contractor, continued to spread on Wednesday as Latin American leaders roundly condemned the refusal to let Bolivia’s president fly over several European nations, rallying to his side after Bolivian officials said the president’s plane had been thwarted because of suspicions that Mr. Snowden was on board.
Spain has authorized Bolivia’s presidential jet to pass through its airspace and continue its journey to Bolivia, the Austrian President has said. The plane was grounded in Austria Wednesday morning over suspicions that Edward Snowden was on board.
[...]
Spanish authorities requested permission to search President Morales’ plane as a condition of transiting through the country, but Bolivian officials refused.
“The Spanish ambassador has told us that his country hasn’t yet allowed the flight over its territory,” Defense Ministry head Ruben Saavedra pointed out.
As for the demand to search the plane, he stressed, “This is blackmail, we are refusing these conditions.”
The Bolivian vice president, Alvaro Garcia, said Morales had been “kidnapped by imperialism.”
Declaring that “you are a modern day Paul Revere; summoning the American people to confront the growing danger of tyranny and one-branch government,” the father of “NSA leaker” on Tuesday .
Imagine a country where children do nothing but play until they start compulsory schooling at age seven. Then, without exception, they attend comprehensives until the age of 16. Charging school fees is illegal, and so is sorting pupils into ability groups by streaming or setting. There are no inspectors, no exams until the age of 18, no school league tables, no private tuition industry, no school uniforms. Children address teachers by their first names. Even 15-year-olds do no more than 30 minutes’ homework a night.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has apologised for telling Congress earlier this year that the National Security Agency (NSA) does not collect data on millions of Americans, a response he now says was “clearly erroneous.”
Covering the Edward Snowden story has not been straightforward for many in the mainstream media, which is reflected in the disjointed coverage it has received in the UK so far. For the newspapers that campaigned so hard to get the communications data bill thrown out because of the implications for privacy, he should be a hero. But then the brash young American “stole” the material, came to the Guardian with it, and has ended up stranded in Russia, where he may or may not receive asylum with the help of Julian Assange. All of which makes him rather unpalatable to many in Fleet Street – and indeed the House of Commons. For many of them, the easier story to tell was the one about Snowden’s girlfriend, who was left bereft in Hawaii.
Actor John Cusack, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, has joined representatives from the Free Press, Mozilla, ColorofChange.org, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Restore the Fourth movement in demanding accountability from the National Security Agency (NSA), in light of revealed information about its PRISM surveillance program.
The Hill reports that that a bipartisan group of 16 members of the House of Representatives continued to pressure the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court today, urging it to turn over rulings that helped lead to the recent NSA surveillance controversy. “The American public cannot engage in a meaningful debate about liberty and surveillance until it knows what its government is doing,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) said.
Thousands of Americans will fogo the traditional Fourth of July backyard barbecue or beach trip this week, instead choosing to join nationwide rallies against recently revealed National Security Agency surveillance programs.
Apparently, the NSA doesn’t think terrorists use Reddit.
As revealed by agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA is hungry for information on the Internet. Under programs like PRISM, it taps Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo to look at the communications of a literally unknowable number of their users. (It’s classified.)
It’s inherently hard to talk about how the NSA gets this information because it obtains classified orders for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is administered by a secret court. Anyone who gets a FISA order is legally obliged to keep mum about it.
But Reddit, despite being one of the most popular U.S.-based social sites in the world, has never gotten a letter from a FISA court. “We have not received any,” Erik Martin, the company’s General Manager, told the Daily Dot.
The general secretary of Reporters Without Borders Christophe Deloire, and WikiLeaks foundator Julian Assange co-sign today an Op-Ed in Le Monde to call out the states of the European Union to protect Edward Snowden.
Since tyranny must shape to itself both the law and the political institutions of its day, it stands to reason that when a governing elite has gone too far in abusing its power, the fight back for liberty by the people at large does not start directly in the political realm or in legislation, itself.
[...]
Why else have both the Left and the Right in our time sat relatively silent as our rights to due process, privacy, and free speech have been removed by such legislation as the Patriot Act and the NDAA, and yet become very vociferous over our right to smoke weed (on the Left) or own guns without restriction (on the Right)? The answer, at least in part, is that smoking and/or guns are part of the culture for many Americans, so government overreach into those areas actually feels like a personal infringement. In contrast, removing your right to due process doesn’t feel like anything until you need due process, and invading your privacy doesn’t feel like anything if you don’t know that it is even happening.
It’s reasonable for a government that illegally spies on Americans to also block its military personnel from viewing leaked NSA files on news agency websites like The Guardian. But who in the military would now dare to “defend” the US Constitution?
[...]
Unfortunately, there is an inherent contradiction built into this oath. How does one defend the Constitution from domestic enemies when these same entities are the ones giving orders? Likewise, following orders as a plea in legal proceedings hasn’t always worked out for officers and subordinates, either.
Politically outspoken director Oliver Stone called Edward Snowden a “hero” during a Fourth of July appearance at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The Oscar winner also blasted President Barack Obama for his “George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques,” calling the controversies a “disgrace.”
Those of us who have been saying that the US has become a weak, or at least more ordinary power among many in the world because of its military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because of its economic decline, will have to recalibrate our analysis after watching the pathetic behavior of the leaders of Russia, Germany and France under pressure from the Obama administration not to allow Edward Snowden to gain asylum in those countries or even to escape his purgatory in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
In his book, ‘Propaganda’, published in 1928, Edward Bernays wrote: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
The American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays invented the term “public relations” as a euphemism for state propaganda. He warned that an enduring threat to the invisible government was the truth-teller and an enlightened public.
In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked US government files known as The Pentagon Papers, revealing that the invasion of Vietnam was based on systematic lying. Four years later, Frank Church conducted sensational hearings in the US Senate: one of the last flickers of American democracy. These laid bare the full extent of the invisible government: the domestic spying and subversion and warmongering by intelligence and “security” agencies and the backing they received from big business and the media, both conservative and liberal.
Speaking about the National Security Agency (NSA), Senator Church said: “I know that the capacity that there is to make tyranny in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law… so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
On 11 June 2013, following the revelations in the Guardian by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg wrote that the US had now fallen into “that abyss”.
While the Chancellery appears to be outraged by the NSA’s spying tactics in Germany, the opposition doubts the revelations came as a surprise to Angela Merkel. Just how much could she have known?
Mike Saunders investigates how the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is protecting us from dodgy megacorps and surveillance-happy governments.
[...]
Taking on the United States Secret Service is a pretty risky venture… But that’s exactly what the EFF did, shortly after it was founded in July 1990. The Secret Service had raided a small videogames book publisher, looking for a stolen technical document that might fall into the wrong hands. Ultimately, it found no evidence to press charges, but the publisher ended up facing bankruptcy, after having its computers seized, missing deadlines, and being forced to lay off staff. Worst of all, the Secret Service erased much of the publisher’s valuable data.
This weekend CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer (6/30/13) did a segment on the latest revelations about NSA surveillance. And who better to interview than… well, the former head of the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden.
Now, in an oppositional media culture, this could make some sense. Hayden oversaw domestic surveillance during some of the Bush years, which of course included the remarkably controversial warrantless wiretapping program. So a serious TV journalist might want to grill him on that history.
First, our cloud computing strategy is clear about the need for a transparent legal framework: like agreeing exactly the limited conditions under which third countries might access online information for law enforcement or national security. Reports about PRISM only increase the urgency. That would be a big step forward to rebuilding essential trust.
The forcing down of the Bolivian President’s jet was a clear breach of the Vienna Convention by Spain and Portugal, which closed their airspace to this Head of State while on a diplomatic mission. It has never been thought necessary to write down in a Treaty that Heads of State enjoy diplomatic immunity while engaged in diplomacy, as their representatives only enjoy diplomatic immunity as cyphers for their Head of State. But it is a hitherto unchallenged precept of customary international law, indeed arguably the oldest provision of international law.
We’ve got a huge challenge on our hands. You’ve probably read about Edward Snowden’s leaks revealing the NSA’s PRISM and GCHQ’s Tempora mass surveillance programmes.
Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
Like everything about this amazing case, Edward Snowden’s attempt to claim asylum has become an enormous story in itself.
Reportedly still holed up in the “transit zone” of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, Snowden’s WikiLeaks-assisted efforts to seek a place of political refuge are proving to be as fraught as you might expect in this increasingly strange affair. Snowden appears to have a good de facto case for receiving asylum – as the barrister Colin Yeo argues here – but, as Yeo also says, Snowden’s future place of residence is likely to be determined more by international politics than by the specific terms of the UN Refugee Convention.
In the pages the German tabloid Bild, President Barack Obama on Tuesday had been renamed OHRbama (Ohr is the German word for ear). He was pictured leaning over to listen to German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a grossly oversized ear.
In a televised interview, French President Francois Hollande used angry words to describe the United States and an eavesdropping program whose size and scope were revealed in weekend news stories that cited documents leaked by one-time NSA computer specialist Edward Snowden. Hollande said the spying must “cease immediately.”
FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee on March 30, 2011, that “technological improvements” now enable the bureau “to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”
A striking finding in a recent Inspector General report revealed that the U.S. Department of State spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook “likes” in the past two years, effectively buying fans.
Internet users worried about their personal information being intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies should stop using websites that send data to the United States, Germany’s top security official said Wednesday.
It really says a lot when you compare how Ed Snowden and James Clapper are being treated these days. Snowden, who revealed the NSA’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance efforts is finding that US pressure and various “technicalities” mean that his asylum requests are getting quickly rejected, leaving him with dwindling options. Meanwhile, James Clapper, who ran the actual program and then flat out lied to Congress about is, can apparently get away with a ridiculous, staged “apology” to Congress for “clearly erroneous” statements.
John Kiriakou, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer currently serving jailtime for leaking the identity of a covert agent, has written an open letter to Edward Snowden, offering advice to the former government contractor who leaked classified information on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.
The handwritten letter was published by FireDogLake on Tuesday.
Writing from prison in Loretto, Pa., Kiriakou praises Snowden for his “heroic” actions.
“I know that it feels like the weight of the world is on your shoulders right now, but as Americans begin to realize that we are devolving into a police state, with the loss of civil liberties that entails, they will see your actions for what they are: heroic,” he writes.
The general secretary of Reporters Without Borders Christophe Deloire, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange co-sign today an Op-Ed in Le Monde to call out the states of the European Union to protect Edward Snowden.
On October 12, 2012, the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize for contributing to the “advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” The EU should show itself worthy of this honor and show its will to defend freedom of information, regardless of fears of political pressure from its so-called closest ally, the United States.
Reddit, Mozilla and a host of other websites are planning to launch an online protest this Fourth of July against the National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic.
The participating sites, including 4chan and WordPress, will display anti-NSA spying messages on their home pages. They will also direct people to the site CallForFreedom.org, where supporters can donate money to help fund TV ads against the intelligence programs and press for action from lawmakers.
A host of some of the biggest names in tech; including Reddit, Mozilla and WordPress, have lent their backing to a series of mass protests planned to take place across the US on Thursday against US surveillance policy.
The organisation has set up around 100 protests across the US, taking place on 4 July in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. An interactive map specifying the locations of the protests is available on the Restore the Fourth website.
President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have agreed to hold a high-level meeting between security officials from their countries in the coming days to discuss in greater detail reports of surveillance activities by the U.S. National Security Agency, the White House said.
The National Security Agency, the spy agency thrown into the public eye following former contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures, is getting hit with furloughs starting next week.
Four new slides released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden through the Washington Post have revived fears that Google and other Internet giants give the US security services a “back door” to access their customers’ data by allowing government monitoring equipment on their premises.
A large coalition of civil rights and privacy groups and potentially thousands of websites will stage protests on the Fourth of July to protest surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency.
As the U.S. National Security Agency scandal has unfolded over the last few weeks, Internet giants Google, Facebook, and Yahoo have been falling over each other to publicly distance themselves from the NSA’s data collection programs, in some cases even going to a secret U.S. court to increase their transparency with the public. By contrast, the nation’s largest phone companies, including Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, have remained stone-cold silent in the face of reports that they’ve participated in a vast, ongoing NSA data collection program targeting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.
Britain’s government has warned the European Union not to squander “once-in-a-lifetime” trade talks with the US after Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency spying revelations.
We begin today’s special on whistleblowers with Edward Snowden, who came forward in June as the man who leaked details about the National Security Agency secret programs to spy on Americans, foreign governments and individuals around the world. He was praised by the country’s best-known whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War. “I think there has not been a more significant or helpful leak or unauthorized disclosure in American history ever than what Edward Snowden shared with The Guardian about the NSA — and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg said. This is an excerpt of the interview Snowden did in June with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.
The Fourth of July is about celebrating the freedom of the United States. This year, it’s marred by PRISM scandal that showed how the US government is collecting personal communications data on the citizens.
High powered sites like WordPress, Reddit, and Mozilla are amongst the usual suspects of privacy-conscientious tech companies supporting the Independence Day protest being organized by non-profit organization Fight for the Future. Who’s not on the list of supporters? Facebook and Google.
Tech giants listed as part of the National Security Agency’s Prism spying program have gone to some lengths to convince the world they aren’t in bed with the U.S. government. Google (GOOG) has filed a request with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court asking permission to disclose more information about the government’s data requests. So there’s a certain irony that NSA programmers are now refining code that Google has approved for the company’s mobile operating system, Android. Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano confirms that the company has already inserted some of the NSA’s programming in Android OS. “All Android code and contributors are publicly available for review at source.android.com,” Scigliano says, declining to comment further.
Thousands of websites, including Reddit, Mozilla and WordPress, will join a July 4 protest against the surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, which have come under growing scrutiny since details were leaked by former technical contractor Edward Snowden. The protest, expected to take place in cities around the country including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, has been spearheaded by an organization called Restore the Fourth.
NSA leaker Edward Snowden is the subject of an open letter of support just published from behind bars by John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent currently serving time for sharing state secrets.
In a letter dated June 13 and published Tuesday by Firedoglake, the imprisoned CIA vet salutes Snowden for his recent disclosures of classified documents detailing some of the vast surveillance programs operated by the United States’ National Security Agency.
When NSA recruiters went to the University of Wisconsin earlier this week to pitch language students on working for the agency, they got more than they bargained for.
The informed students turned the question-and-answer session into a hearing. On trial were the NSA’s lies, their legality, and how they define “adversary”.
On Tuesday, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein apologizing for statements that he had made in March before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Clapper sought to justify lies he made at the time regarding National Security Agency spying programs by claiming he had made a “mistake.”
Edward Snowden may become the most famous civil rights case this century, and throw up issues of data protection, intelligence, and the relationship between partners and allies that concern citizens of all free states.
Following revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden about US government spying, businesses are turning away from US-based cloud services such as Dropbox.
One day before members of the Icelandic Parliament are due to break for summer vacation, leaders of three political parties have submitted a special piece of legislation which would make NSA whistleblower and fugitive, Edward Snowden, a citizen of Iceland.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be given political asylum in France, party leaders from across the political spectrum have said in the wake of the latest US spying allegations.
One day before members of the Icelandic Parliament are due to break for summer vacation, leaders of three political parties have submitted a special piece of legislation which would make NSA whistleblower and fugitive, Edward Snowden, a citizen of Iceland.
The suspicion that Bolivian President Evo Morales’ jet was carrying Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who has become Washington´s public enemy number one, triggered an unprecedented international incident.
Four European countries – France, Italy, Spain and Portugal – denied Morales’ presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way back from Moscow to La Paz.
The 4th of July is always a little bit odd for us here in the UK. It’s usually accompanied with wry jokes about how we should never have let the former colony go. Jokes that mask Britain’s enduring inability to see how the world, and our place in it, has changed. What has changed above all is that the balance of power is utterly reversed. Whether it is on foreign policy or on the domestic surveillance of our citizens, successive UK governments follow America’s lead unswervingly. We’re not quite Airstrip One yet, but the 4th is no cause for fireworks and parades this side of the pond as far as I’m concerned.
Syrian rebels have issued a ban on women using make up or wearing “immodest dress” in a neighborhood in the city of Aleppo. Critics have blasted the move as another attempt by Islamists to impose Sharia in rebel-controlled territory.
The fatwa (an order based on Sharia law) was issued by the Islamic law council in Aleppo’s Fardous neighborhood.
To introduce interviews with the editors of the magazines New York, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired and GQ, Port editor Dan Crowe wrote:
We have long warned against the risk of police powers being used far beyond how Parliament intended, and in situations where there is no real cause for suspicion. Stop and search powers have been one of the starkest example of how things can get out of control.
The use of the powers have always been controversial, especially amongst ethnic minority communities, however there was public outrage after it came to light that between 2007-2009 450,000 people were stopped and searched under section 44 of the Terrorism Act; none were convicted or terrorism-related charges.
Further, The World is asserting that the NDAA bill is undeniably a “nasty piece of legislative mischief” — “gives current and future presidents unprecedented power,” and is a “dramatic expansion of federal authority.” However, the newspaper is also asserting that this initiative, taken by the commissioners, is nothing but a “roar of futility” in which the commissioners “have no legitimate role.” We heard that same claptrap in Oakland County.
This Fourth of July, EFF will be demonstrating our commitment to your Constitutional right of privacy from government surveillance by displaying the text of the Fourth Amendment on our website. This demonstration is a visual symbol of our opposition to the illegal and unconstitutional surveillance by the National Security Agency, which the government now admits has been collecting data on millions of ordinary Americans not suspected of any crime. We, along with the Internet Defense League and many other organizations, are showing online solidarity with the Restore the Fourth movement, a nonpartisan, grassroots movement that is planning protests against NSA spying on July 4th in cities across the United States.
Now, however, we are seeing an evil that has infected an entire society. In a moral society, Manning’s treatment would have been intolerable—absolutely unacceptable. In a moral society, the war crimes he has allegedly brought to light would be intolerable—absolutely unacceptable. Instead, people in the U.S. are, by and large, passive and complicit, as if the 9/11 attacks could in any way be construed to justify what is being done in their name. The consequences are nothing less than astonishing.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms — of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
The US government has refused to stop force-feeding detainees on hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay during the holy month of Ramadan.
In court papers rejecting a petition by four of more than 100 detainees said to be refusing food, the US said the feedings provided “essential nutritional and medical care” and would not interfere with religious observance of Ramadan, which begins on Monday.
The US authorities’ relentless campaign to hunt down and block whistleblower Edward Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum is deplorable and amounts to a gross violation of his human rights Amnesty International said today.
A haunting series of portraits of women who had limbs amputated after the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh on April 24, 2013. It was the worst disaster in the history of the garment industry — 1,129 people were killed, and many others were grievously injured. Canadian photojournalist Kevin Frayer of The Associated Press photographed nine of these women in June 2013, as they recovered at Enam Medical College in Savar, Bangladesh.
“Any time you take a photograph or a video of children, anyone under the age of 18, engaged in sexual conduct, it’s considered production of child pornography,” detective William Lindsey told the Orlando Sentinel. “It’s illegal to take the photograph or the video, it’s illegal to possess it and it’s illegal to transmit it.”
Orin Kerr has posted the appeal brief [PDF] just filed on behalf of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer. It is a group work, with EFF’s Hanni M. Fakhoury, Marcia C. Hofmann, and Tor B. Ekeland and Mark H. Jaffe of the law firm Tor Ekeland, PC, also listed as representing the appellant. It’s another hair-pulling Computer Fraud and Abuse Act case, so I believe you’re interested in knowing about it. It’s a law in desperate need of adjustment, but in the meanwhile, because it’s so vague, it’s being stretched beyond what the law was intended to cover by overcharging and misunderstanding, the brief argues, and vagueness can reach the level of being a violation of the Constitution.
A panel of three federal judges overseeing California’s prison overcrowding case on Wednesday rejected Gov. Jerry Brown’s request for a stay of their order that the state immediately begin reducing its inmate population.
So, walk away from Netflix to get off the couch, sure, but more importantly, do it for the future of the World Wide Web. It’s time to do more than turn off the TV: It’s time to #CancelNetflix.
Today, exactly one year after the final rejection of ACTA, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in strong reaction to the massive spying by the USA. Our representatives have failed to demand that the upcoming secret negotiations of trans-atlantic trade agreement be frozen. In a context where EU officials are being spied upon by US counterparts, this upcoming “super-ACTA” will be born with very little legitimacy.
Summary: The latest Stallman interview, which deals with NSA involvement in Microsoft Windows and how to use search engines anonymously
TODAY we turn our attention to two subjects which are not frequently tackled by the corporate media. The first one expands on matters we covered in the second part and to a lesser degree the first part of this interview. The second subject is anonymity. Browsing the Web these days is hard without identifying oneself, due to many cookies and cross-site interaction (e.g. Google and Facebook code inside plenty of Web pages). I asked Stallman what to use for search and the full transcript follows.
Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: Whenever the source code is being passed for the NSA before release, as you see before the release of Windows Vista or Windows 7, they always pass it through the NSA and they assure you that it’s fine and that it [has[ gone through hardening of the operating system. I think fewer people will believe that after the Snowden leaks, but anyway I…
Dr. Richard M. Stallman: Well, the thing is, it’s different in the case of Windows because Microsoft keeps that source code secret from the users, which is in itself reason to distrust it and that’s why it has the universal back door. The users can’t take that out, so once software is proprietary, that means that the owner of a program has power over the users, it subjugates the users and that is an opportunity for abuses. But that opportunity is not there in the same way with Free software where the users can change this code. Not only do it individually, but they can work together to make their own version of it.
RSS: I’d like to [discuss] different sort of strand of topics. I have everything written down in terms of, like, one-word or two-word kind of a summary of things I wanted to go through and the next few things are to do with browsing and the of of the Internet in the form of the World Wide Web.
“Well, I generally use DuckDuckGo first, but I will use the Google search engine also.”So, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what do you suggest to people who want to do a Web search and what do you use yourself?
RMS: Well, it’s fine to use any search engine as long as it has no idea of who you are.
RSS: And which one would you personally use the most?
RMS: Well, I generally use DuckDuckGo first, but I will use the Google search engine also.
RSS: There are several… OK, this actually relates to a discussion I’ve been having all over the Internet in the past few months and the thing about DuckDuckGo, it’s hosted in the United States, whereas something like IXQuick or StartPage are based in Holland, and some people have pointed out that DuckDuckGo is using Yahoo, which basically means Microsoft for search results, to a certain degree. And they also seem to be very…
“The point is, if you identify yourself to a search engine, you are basically helping it track you.”RMS: Look, we don’t know to what extent [duck duck go records things]…. there is no proof that DuckDuckGo doesn’t track IP addresses, for instance, of requesters. And they could have been [tracking], right? What can they possibly do to prove that they don’t track people? The point is, I don’t refuse to use Google search engine either because I just never find myself in such a way… I always just use it from other people’s computers, people who have let me use them, of course. I don’t break security, I borrow people’s computers for a few minutes… for a while [incomprehensible] to use, so my searches are done from lots of different machines and each of those machines is mainly used by others.
RSS: OK, so basically you suggest trying to discourage the tracking by using different IP addresses…
RMS: Well, you could use Tor also. The point is, if you identify yourself to a search engine, you are basically helping it track you.
RSS: And increasingly they do provide incentives for people to be logged in, explicitly, when they are using a service like YouTube or Google search engine, which is something that didn’t happen before and I think that’s something that exploits the need for convenience — to have people give away their identity whenever they use the search engine, which didn’t exist about 10 years ago, it’s a new thing. Also, I wanted to point out, I had this small argument with DuckDuckGo over the fact, for example, that even though they don’t retain the data, all of their infrastructure is hosted on Amazon, so Amazon knows people’s IP addresses and whether there is some tracking at the router or some place or another, there might be a third party knowing…
RMS: Yeah, the point is that, the NSA might snoop all your packets and see that you’re sending a packet to DuckDuckGo. You can’t stop that, so the point is, I don’t assume that doing the search there means that I won’t be recorded in any way, but there’s no way they would know that it was me.
RSS: So basically, the notion of anonymity is important here. The use of the Net anonymously…
The next part will deal with anonymity in a broader context, so stay tuned.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Roy is a Software Engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and an advocate of fair competition. He holds a doctoral degree in Medical Biophysics. Contact us (encrypted/PGP)
Dr. Richard M. Stallman: Well, the thing is, it’s different in the case of Windows because Microsoft keeps that source code secret from the users, which is in itself reason to distrust it and that’s why it has the universal back door. The users can’t take that out, so once software is proprietary, that means that the owner of a program has power over the users, it subjugates the users and that is an opportunity for abuses. But that opportunity is not there in the same way with Free software where the users can change this code. Not only do it individually, but they can work together to make their own version of it.
Content is available under CC-BY-SA