04.05.14

As the World Moves to GNU/Linux Propaganda From Microsoft-funded Proxies Claims Opposite of What Microsoft Intended

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 9:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux is rapidly gaining, partly because of Microsoft’s mistakes

Summary: Reports about new Microsoft-funded propaganda are easily serving as yet more proof that Windows and other Microsoft software ought to be abandoned

EVERY YEAR we are told the same lies. The propaganda is coordinated by Microsoft-funded entities like IDC and the Business Software Alliance (BSA). We tackled this propaganda year after year, also noting that IDG (the parent of IDC) helps disseminate the propaganda in the corporate press. It’s disgusting and it really ought to stop. It’s like the classic routine of rogue think tanks.

Glyn Moody has done a good job tackling the propaganda in two blogs. One of them was his Open Enterprise blog (ironically hosted by IDG), where he wrote: “As those make clear, we are talking here about Windows malware, found on purchased PCs, Web sites, in P2P downloads and CDs bought on the street. Moreover, it’s evident the infected software is proprietary, paid-for software. Why do we know that? Well, for the simple reason that nobody pirates open source software, because it’s always free of charge, by definition. So Microsoft’s report is about closed-source code, running on Windows.

“This means that IDC/Microsoft’s disturbingly high figure of $500 billion for 2014 is not so much the projected worldwide cost for enterprises of using pirated software, as the cost of running non-free programs on Windows. Most of that $500 billion could be saved – pretty much at a stroke – simply by switching to free software. ”

Glyn Moody also wrote about it in TechDirt (very large audience), under the headline “Microsoft-Sponsored Study Says Problems Caused By Using Windows Software Will Cost Businesses $500 Billion In 2014″ (similar to the other headline he chose). To quote his arguments: “Although the report doesn’t say so explicitly, we are clearly dealing with Windows systems here — computers are referred to throughout as “PCs,” never as Macs, and some of the malware is named as “Win32/Enosch.A, Win32/Sality.AT, Win32/Pramro.F,” which attack Windows systems exclusively. We can also be pretty sure that none of the infected programs was open source. Why? Because pirating software that is already freely available makes no sense — and is certainly unlikely to be as profitable as offering black market versions of costly closed-source programs.

“Putting this information together — in order to “Get The Facts” as Microsoft always liked to say — we arrive at the interesting conclusion that the use of commercial closed-source programs running on Microsoft Windows will cost businesses around $500 billion in 2014 alone because of the wasted time, lost data and reputational damage that will result from associated malware infections.”

Moody did a good job breaking down the arguments, so we need not do this again (we do this every year). Instead, let’s look at the situation Microsoft is in.

Yesterday and the day before that we wrote about the rise of Chromebooks, which led to a massive campaign of FUD and AstroTurfing from Microsoft. It’s always the same. Moody links to this article from the British press [via], stating that “London Council Dumping Windows For Chromebooks To Save £400,000″ (this was later covered in [1]). There’s no denying the fact that Vista 8 is driving many enterprises away from Windows and Vista 8.1 won’t change much, based on SJVN’s analysis that says: “By this time next year we’ll know if Microsoft has managed to reclaim its users’ and vendors’ mind-share, or if we really are seeing the end of the PC computing market in favor of a mobile, cloud-based computing paradigm.”

A state with 70 million people is now moving to GNU/Linux [2], so it’s rather clear where we’re heading. “Microsoft finally admits defeat,” says a Microsoft-friendly site [3] regarding the future Windows 8 update and based on numerous reports, Microsoft now drops the price of Windows to 0 for some device types [4]. “Apple already made the move to free-of-charge operating systems,” explains iophk. “Between that and FOSS, the OS has become a commodity. This is good, without charging, Microsoft cannot give kickbacks or similar financial incentives, at least not for much longer.”

You really know that Microsoft is deep in trouble when even its peripheral PR, such as Microsoft Peter [5], projects worry about the number of XP users (people who still use a version of Windows from 2001). Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ quotes US figures and says [6] that “[a]bout 95% of the 211,000 ATMs owned by financial institutions, run some version of XP. But some of those machines run on a unique version Microsoft will support until 2016, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo sent in March. Independent companies, such as gas stations, own another 210,000.”

Many of them will move to Linux. Even Rupert Murdoch’s company, despite being anti-Google, is dumping Microsoft for Google. Interesting times. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. London borough drops Windows, goes with Chromebooks, saves around £400,000

   Microsoft has more reasons to worry about Linux. After reports that an Indian state switched from Windows XP to Linux, now a UK-based organization is ditching Windows and going for Linux-based Chromebooks. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham is going the open source way as it shifts away from Windows XP desktops in favor of 2,000 Samsung 303Cs Chromebooks for employees and 300 Chromeboxes for reception desks and shared work areas across the borough.

2. Tamil Nadu’s XP migration plan: Go Linux like a BOSS

   The Indian State of Tamil Nadu will solve its Windows XP problem by adopting Linux.

   Tamil Nadu is home to over 70 million people and its capital city is Chennai, a hub for India’s business process outsourcing industry second only to Bangalore.

3. Microsoft finally admits defeat, will bring Start menu back in future Windows 8 update

4. Will free Windows make Microsoft bleed to death?

5. One week before its end of life, 28 percent of Web users are still on Windows XP

6. Windows XP: Old Platforms Die Hard, Security Risks Live On

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Society Still Occupied by Bill Gates and Other Plutocrats

Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 9:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A roundup of some recent news about Microsoft’s criminal co-founder and his siege against the poor, the oppressed, or his competition, including free press and the truth

BASED on the headings in The Guardian, Bill Gates continues to funnel money (via proxy) for his publicity charades and for The Guardian to never criticise him or his investments (as The Guardian used to do before it got bribed by Gates). We are currently in contact with a person who is intimately aware of Gates funds being misused in the developing world (more on that soon), basically alleging that through personal involvement he saw how in places like Africa Gates was doing harm, not good. Now, watch how the the Gates-funded The Guardian helps Gates abduct the “Ubuntu” brand/term (with a Gates advertisement at the top). This is a regular thing. It’s lobbying and it is corrupting the press.

There are other areas that Gates is corrupting, including for example US education. The Gates Foundation must have just suffered a major setback as its lobbying for Common Core (using publicly-funded schools to indoctrinate the next generation for plutocrats) got struck out by a governor [1]. “In other good news from that article,” wrote a person in this comment, “my state, Oklahoma, is considering ditching Common Core.”

People who don’t quite grasp how harmful Gates and his ilk have been to this world should recall Microsoft’s relationship with the NSA, which is ideologically tied to Gates' support of the NSA (he has privatised surveillance also and significant investments in G4S).

It has become clear, owing to disclosures from the “Occupy” movement, that the surveillance apparatus protects plutocrats like Gates from the vast majority of the population. Read the new story “David “Debt” Graeber evicted, implicates NYPD intelligence, claims revenge-harassment for OWS participation” (the FBI was shown to have characterised Occupy as “low-level terrorism” and treated it as such). It’s class war. Don’t look for enemies among the lower classes or immigrants (xenophobia). The enemies are well groomed, well known, and we are regularly shown them in corporations-owned media. These are neither scapegoats nor poetic villains; they are people who know very well what they are doing and hence they try to buy our schools, the media, politicians, and everything else which forms our perception of the world. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Gov. Mike Pence signs bill to ditch Common Core

   Less than four years after Indiana became an early adopter of the national Common Core education standards, Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation Monday making Indiana the first state to opt out of the controversial school guidelines.

   But the law does not prohibit parts of Common Core from being written into new standards that are expected to be voted on by the state Board of Education late next month.

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Don’t Be Fooled by Microsoft: .NET is Proprietary Software, Still

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The “open” circus returns

Summary: Publicity stunt from Microsoft strives to bamboozle the gullible, leading to the false perception that .NET is now “open”

Microsoft was caught openwashing DOS and other Microsoft "crown jewels" (that it had bought) some days ago. The OSI’s President was far from impressed, having watched Microsoft pulling these stunts to also openwash Azure and other such NSA-friendly proprietary software traps.

“I wonder why they don’t just skin FreeBSD or GNU/Linux and throw in Wine and Samba…”
      –MinceRAs we have argued over the years, Microsoft used Mono to openwash .NET and having created several openwashing proxies, including CodePlex and Outercurve (there are more), Microsoft goes further in trying to paint .NET “open”, blurring the gap between proprietary and Open Source (basically just creating confusion).

The Microsoft-friendly news sites helped advance Microsoft’s agenda with PR puff pieces like this one or that one. To quote one example: “For years, Microsoft has flirted with the open-source movement, trying to build bridges with developers that favor publicly released code over proprietary software. This week, the software giant finally made the big moves skeptics of its commitment to open source have been looking for.”

Nonsense. Hogwash.

As Lirodon put it in our IRC channels, they have “just released a few components (i.e. the Roslyn C# compiler, WinJS) under Apache license” and “perhaps they feel the end,” MinceR added.

MinceR also joked: “I wonder why they don’t just skin FreeBSD or GNU/Linux and throw in Wine and Samba… and maybe KVM/QEMU with a stripped-down winblows image for “legacy applications”.”

Well, Microsoft cannot afford to really embrace GNU/Linux, only to try to extort it and make it more expensive. It should be emphasised that nothing really changed with the above openwashing move, which is not even the first of its kind. █

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SCOTUS Works For Plutocrats, But It May, For a Change, Axe Software Patents

Posted in Patents at 8:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Update on the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case which can effectively end software patents where they originally came from

THE SCOTUS, like the USPTO, practically exists to serve corporations while claiming to serve people’s interests. We showed many examples of this over the years, especially when we closely covered patent matters.

SCOTUS has just proven, yet again, that it serves the interests of the top fraction of the top 1% of income earners — people who provide the majority of funding to political candidates [1,2]. Sen. Bernie Sanders says that SCOTUS undermines democracy by allowing billionaires to “buy elections”.

SOCTUS us losing the trust of US citizens. There is no question about it. Meanwhile, however, “Software Patents On [are] The Ropes In SCOTUS,” Robert Pogson claims, citing some recent filings/proceedings. Where is Groklaw when you need it? Having witnessed the Bilski case some years ago (famous case at SCOTUS), we are highly sceptical of the possibility that anything significant will happen. SCOTUS is typically doing what the corporations are asking for. As TechDirt put it the other day: “Four years ago, the Supreme Court had a chance to establish once and for all whether or not software was patentable. The Bilski case got all sorts of attention as various parties lined up to explain why software patents were either evil, innovation-killing monsters or the sole cause of innovation since the cotton gin and everything in between (only slight exaggeration). Rather than actually answer the question everyone was asking, the Supreme Court decided to rule especially narrowly, rejecting the specific patents at stake in the case and saying that the current test used to determine patentability (the so-called “machine-or-transformation” test) need not be the only test for patentability. However, it declined to say what tests should be used, leaving it up to the lower courts to start ruling blindly, making up new tests as they went along. And muddle along blindly they did — right up to the height of pure absurdism in the CAFC (appeals court that handles patents) ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, in which every single judge disagreed with each other. The ruling was 135 pages of confused mess where all justices only agreed on a single paragraph, which (like Bilski) said this particular patent was invalid, but no one could agree why.”

Let’s wait and see if the SCOTUS can surprise all of us by effectively putting at peril all software patents (in one fell swoop). This is the most important thing for Free software. The Register has this new article about “More software patent silliness,” noting that in China there are software patent applications, e.g. one relating to Wine on ARM (we covered that a few days ago.

“The filing has irritated Wine contributor André Hentschel,” the author says, “who points to his code commits from 2010, and remarks that “from my point of view there are no facts in that potential patent that should be patented”.

“Whether that’s sufficient to block the Chinese patent application CN102364433 is another question.”

We need to stop software patents in the US before they spread further. The tendency is for US law to get exported to almost every continent. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Supreme Court ruling on campaign contributions: More clout for the rich

   The wealthiest 1% of Americans will likely play an even larger role in elections following the Supreme Court decision Wednesday that freed rich donors to give as much as $3.5 million per election to the array of candidates running for Congress.

   The 5-4 decision struck down a Watergate-era limit that barred a single donor from giving more than $123,200 to congressional candidates every two years.

2. Supreme Court strikes down aggregate campaign giving limits

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Linux News: 3.15 Development, Collaboration Summit, Kay Sievers, and Graphics

Posted in News Roundup at 7:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Linux 3.15

• Radeon DRM Kernel Driver Gets More Changes With Linux 3.15

  A Radeon pull request for drm-next changes was sent in this morning for ultimately landing with the Linux 3.15 kernel.

• Linux 3.15 Random To Support Intel’s RDSEED

  Intel Broadwell processors introduce a new RDSEED CPU instruction that is used as a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). The RDRAND instruction (also known as Bull Mountain) that was introduced with Ivy Bridge CPUs is considered by the US NIST as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. The RDSEED instruction meanwhile is considered a non-deterministic random bit generator in compliance with NIST’s SP 800-90 B and C.

• Old x86 Platforms To Be Removed With Linux 3.15

• Linux 3.15 Squeezes In More ACPI / PM Improvements

• Scheduler Improvements Land In Next Kernel Release

• Linux 3.15 Kernel Gains EFI Mixed Mode Support

  Landing into the latest Linux kernel code for version 3.15 is EFI mixed mode support that will allow 64-bit kernels to run from 32-bit EFI firmware.

  One of the features that was merged into Git this afternoon as part of the EFI pull request for the Linux 3.15 merge window is EFI mixed mode support. The EFI mixed mode support allows 64-bit kernels to be booted from 32-bit EFI firmware as long as the boot-loader supports EFI’s handover protocol.

Collaboration Summit

• Collab Recap: Tracing Changes Coming to the Kernel, and More

• PostgreSQL and Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Fsync Issues at Collaboration Summit

  Last week, I attended the Linux Storage, Filesystems, and Memory Management summit (LSF/MM) on Monday and Tuesday, and the Linux Collaboration Summit (aka Collab) from Wednesday through Friday. Both events were held at the Meritage Resort in Napa, CA. This was by invitation of some Linux developers who wanted to find out more about what PostgreSQL needs from the Linux kernel. Andres Freund and I attended on behalf of the PostgreSQL community; Josh Berkus was present for part of the time as well.

• One Engineer’s Hands-on Experience with KVM at Collaboration Summit

  In the last five years I have experienced a few professional transitions, changing employers from a Software Engineering role to System Administrator role, and from developing and/or testing software for “Legacy” operating systems and proprietary software to infrastructure services delivery using large scale UNIX and Linux customer environments. I have gone from only imagining what challenges Systems Administrators have in developing systems management software, to actually knowing them first hand. Now in the last year, I have a new job working on process, procedures and tools improvements and knowledge management activities for UNIX and Linux Infrastructure Delivery at Dell.

Linus Torvalds

• Linus Bans RH Hacker, Calligra 2.8 Sweeet, and SUSE 12

• Linus Torvalds suspends key Linux developer

  An argument between developers of some of the most basic parts of Linux turned heated this week, resulting in a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor being banned from working on the Linux kernel.

• RedHat Kicks The Anthill Over At Kernel.org

  Just as anthills have their strange way of getting repaired, the stresses between two huge tectonic plates of FLOSS will seek equilibrium and life will go on, until the next time…

• Linus Torvalds not happy with systemd author Kay Sievers

  The Linux kernel developers and systemd developers locked horns this week over a bug in systemd which would stop systems from booting up. The bug was filed by Borislav Petkov where he explained that systemd bug was not allowing him to log into the machine. Kay Sievers, the co-author of systemd, suggested kernel developers not to use ‘generic’ term “debug”, “Like for the kernel, there are options to fin-grain control systemd’s logging behaviour; just do not use the generic term “debug” which is a convenience shortcut for the kernel AND the Base OS.”

Graphics Stack

• Initial XWayland Support Merged For X.Org Server 1.16

  As anticipated, X.Org Server 1.16 when released this summer will feature initial support for XWayland.

  XWayland is the compatibility layer for running legacy X11 applications atop Wayland. The XWayland code has been baking for a while and as of a few hours ago the initial support was finally merged. This XWayland merging came just in time as the merge window for the six-month update, X.Org Server 1.16, is soon closing.

• NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 Jetson Will Be A Late April Debut

  The Jetson board was announced with a $192 MSRP and a pledge to ship in April. Now that it’s April, some Phoronix readers who also jumped on this bandwagon may be wondering about more details… Through more sources, I’ve found out that it’s planned for a late April debut. Those who pre-ordered the Jetson will find their boards shipped in about three weeks if they ordered via NewEgg or NVIDIA.com. Everything I’ve heard from my sources about this Tegra K1 board remain very positive and that it’s performing very well. Stay tuned and in three weeks we’ll have up some very interesting new ARM benchmarks on Phoronix.

• Wayland Gains Fullscreen Shell, Screen Sharing Support

  Going back numerous months has been a proposal for a full-screen shell protocol initially for the Weston compositor but could be promoted to an official Wayland protocol in the future. The fullscreen shell protocol is designed to make it easy to support simple full-screen clients like splash screens and terminal emulators in an easy and convenient manner rather than having the simple clients talk to DRM/KMS directly, input/output abstraction, easing up development of compositors, and allowing support for screen sharing and recording.

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04.04.14

Security News: Full Disclosure Threatened Out of Existence, Laws Warped for Incarceration

Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Full-Disclosure

• Prominent security mailing list Full Disclosure shuts down indefinitely

• Full-Disclosure security mailing list shuts down

  Once on the cutting edge of vulnerability disclosure, Full-Disclosure has become too unpleasant to read or moderate.

• Full-Disclosure Mailing List Shuts Down

  From the time I first started writing regularly about IT security in 2003 until today, the Full-Disclosure mailing list has been a must-read resource every day—but that apparently is ending today.

‘Ethical’

• IE, Firefox, Flash Fall at Pwn2Own, but Exploit Unicorn Still Lives

• Crash, bang, boom: Down go all the major browsers at Pwn2Own

• WPA2 wireless security cracked

  iophk: “Maybe it’s time for the wireless industry to consult cryptography and security professionals before embarking on drafting the next encryption standard.”

Weev

• Hacker Andrew ‘Weev’ Auernheimer attempts to overturn conviction

• Prosecutors Admit They Don’t Understand What Weev Did, But They’re Sure It’s Like Blowing Up A Nuclear Plant

  We’ve been covering the ridiculous DOJ case against Andrew “weev” Auernheimer for quite some time. If you don’t recall, Auernheimer and a partner found a really blatant security hole on AT&T’s servers that allowed them to very easily find out the email addresses of iPad owners. There was no breaking in to anything. The issue was that AT&T left this all exposed. But, with a very dangerous reading of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and a bunch of folks who don’t understand basic technology, weev was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail (and has been kept in solitary confinement for much of his stay so far). Part of the case is complicated by the fact that weev is kind of a world class jerk — who took great thrill in being an extreme online troll, getting a thrill out of making others miserable. But, that point should have no standing in whether or not exposing a security hole by basically entering a URL that AT&T failed to secure, becomes a criminal activity.

Misc.

• 10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits

  Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services.

• Weak Random Number Generator Threatens iOS 7 Kernel Exploit Mitigations

  A revamped early random number generator in iOS 7 is weaker than its vulnerable predecessor and generates predictable outcomes.

  A researcher today at CanSecWest said an attacker could brute force the Early Random PRNG used by Apple in its mobile operating system to bypass a number of kernel exploit mitigations native to iOS.

• Tor network used to hide 900 botnets and darknet markets, says Kaspersky Lab

  The Tor network is in danger of being swamped by criminals abusing its anonymity to hide an underworld of parasitic botnets, malicious command and control and ‘darknet’ markets, according to research from Kaspersky Lab.

• Cisco launches Internet of Things security challenge

• Touchlogging Represents a Real Mobile Risk

  For years, security researchers have warned about the risks of keylogging software on computing platforms. Keyloggers, quite literally log and record the keystrokes taken by a user in a bid to learn passwords and other valuable information.

• Train derails at Chicago Intl Airport, rams into platform (PHOTOS)

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Spin Watch: ‘WikiLeaks’ Forum, Transparency, Disappearing Aircraft, Tobacco, and BBC

Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

• WikiLeaks-Forum: Who’s Who?

  Regrettably, the owner of WikiLeaks-Forum strives to manipulate public opinion in several ways with the help of his staffers. The forum pretends to host lively discussions of a huge community while in fact most of the forum posts (more than 90 percent) are done by staffers.

• The Republican Street Fight Over Transparency in Government

  Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?

• Disappearing Aircraft

  I had fairly well concluded that the most likely cause was a fire disrupting the electrical and control systems, when CNN now say the sharp left turn was pre-programmed 12 minutes before sign off from Malaysian Air Traffic control, which was followed fairly quickly by that left turn.

• How Big Tobacco’s lobbyists get what they want from the media

  Almost everything is fake. The brave proverbs with which we were brought up – the truth will out, cheats never prosper, virtue will triumph – turn out to be unfounded. For the most part, our lives are run and our views are formed by chancers, cheats and charlatans. They construct a labyrinth of falsehoods from which it is almost impossible to emerge without the help of people who devote their lives to navigating it. This is the role of the media. But the media drag us deeper into the labyrinth.

  There are two kinds of corporate lobbyists in the UK. There are those who admit they are lobbyists but operate behind closed doors, and there are those who operate openly but deny they are lobbyists. Because David Cameron has broken his promise to shine “the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and … come clean about who is buying power and influence” we still “don’t know who is meeting whom. We don’t know whether any favours are being exchanged. We don’t know which outside interests are wielding unhealthy influence … Commercial interests – not to mention government contracts – worth hundreds of billions of pounds are potentially at stake.” (All that was Cameron in 2010, by the way) At the same time, the media is bustling with people working for thinktanks which refuse to say who is paying them, making arguments that favour big business and billionaires.

• The BBC, not its young viewers, might be the biggest losers when BBC3 goes

  The channel has made an extraordinary connection with its target audience of 16- to 34-year-olds. Its closure could alienate a generation

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Copyrights and Reform News

Posted in Intellectual Monopoly at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

• Copyright Reform: We’re Getting Somewhere

  A spokesperson for BIS (the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills), commented on the reforms, saying, “One of these measures is copyright exception for archiving and preserving. The existing preservation exception will be updated to apply to all types of media and to museums and galleries, as well as libraries and archives.”

• Police Prepare to Place Banner Ads on Pirate Sites

• Saudi Arabia Government Blocks The Pirate Bay (and More)

  The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture and Information has blocked access to The Pirate Bay, for reasons yet unknown. In addition to the notorious torrent site, Torrentz.eu, Rarbg and possibly several others are blocked too. As always, local users are already discussing ways to work around the restrictions.

• De La Soul X BitTorrent Bundle: Smell the DA.I.S.Y.

  In 1989, a little known group from New York released an album that would change the course of hip hop. De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising sounded like nothing else: spoken word, skit, and psychedelia; sampled exhaustively, sampled from life. 25 years in, it sounds all the more remarkable. It sounds like the Internet.

• Civil Rights Lawyer To Fight U.S. Govt. in Internet Piracy Case

  Two individuals accused of millions of dollars worth of Android piracy signed plea agreements with the U.S. Government last week, but at least one other defendant has different things in mind. With the hiring of a “much-feared civil rights lawyer”, the former operator of Applanet is going on the offensive against the DOJ.

• Prenda Law stunner: “Porn trolls” win a round, dodge sanctions

  It’s been almost a year since US District Judge Otis Wright issued a sanction order repudiating the lawyers behind the “copyright trolling” organization known as Prenda Law. Since then, several other judges have pounded Prenda with expensive sanction orders. Just last week, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and John Steele—the three lawyers commonly linked to Prenda—were found to be in contempt of a devastating sanction order won by AT&T and Comcast.

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