Direct download as Ogg (00:02:02, 6.7 MB)
Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, speaks about the harms caused by Steve Jobs
Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense
Completing the seventh year soon…
Summary: As its motto claims, or as the old saying goes, Techrights vows to fight the good fight in the increasingly-oppressed digital landscape
The war on dissent is being fought against computer programmers and other such folks who are technical, recognising — quite correctly — that they have power to fight back against abusers of power. This goes beyond digital protests and extends to journalism. Abuses of the secret services, for example, are getting hard to hide because people out there facilitate anonymous Internet usage and truly private chats. In their book, Julian Assange and co-authors stressed the importance of ciphers, focusing on one particular cornerstone of online activism. Here in Techrights, key members have been encrypting E-mail for quite some time and using anonymisation tools (we received important leaks and scoops over the years). Whatever makes a group harder to map makes it harder to disrupt. It doesn’t mean that given enough effort it will stay impossible to map, but it sure helps discourage that. One key member of the site — someone whom I have known since around 2005 — complained in several E-mails today that LinkedIn somehow still managed to link him to me (he works from Internet cafes and is very privacy-conscious). When data gets passed around and moreover sold, even the most prudent among us find ourselves unable to stay low key. Pamela Jones had a legitimate point to be concerned about. When people put their job on the line and reach out to reporters we must have some safe harbours and assurances that not everything is being tracked. Surveillance deters sources from coming forth, drying up investigative journalism as a result.
“Everything is peaceful and stable now, but the world is not. There is a lot of work to be done.”Those who have followed this site since 2006 have seen it going through harder times. Threats, DDOS attacks, smear campaigns etc. probably peaked around 5 years ago and even members of the site suffered from it (insults and threats were common). In recent years we have suffered from almost not a single troll. The focus on the site was not defence from opponents’ attacks (this was common in early days) but the subjects we wish to tackle. Everything is peaceful and stable now, but the world is not. There is a lot of work to be done.
Over the past few days we have gathered some new stories that show how corporations and/or the people who lead them control politics and gain an increasing level of power over everything (see links at the bottom). This in itself is not news and it is not shocking. But it is helping to show where many of society’s fears like war, famine, climate change etc. come from, directly or indirectly.
A lot of people think that pollution, war, and economic disparity (among many issues that would take a paragraph just to name) can be addressed by selecting a political party which big businesses control through money. It’s not an election, it’s selection, where one typically gets just two choices (the choice between spokespeople elected by plutocrats).
Bill Gates is not the devil and he is not the world’s only problem. Microsoft is not daemonic and eliminating just Microsoft would not render software benign overnight or the computer industry more fair over time. In my discussions with Stallman it repeatedly comes up that Apple worries him more than Microsoft. I don’t share this view, but I can accept the premise laid out by him. While I’m away (summer vacation, will take photos as usual) a scheduled story will appear where Stallman speaks to me about Steve Jobs and Apple.
“Over the coming year we will cover more Apple news from a sceptical eye, but Microsoft will stay the centre of focus.”Several weeks ago Obama served Apple like no president before him. In a sense, this was a troubling reminder of the rising power of Apple, which only Android seems to be effectively limiting. At the stores here in the UK I saw just Android and Apple products on the shelves (I bought something for the tablet earlier today). Apple is far from dead here. The Apple brand may be diminishing, but Apple still has some momentum.
Over the coming year we will cover more Apple news from a sceptical eye, but Microsoft will stay the centre of focus. Microsoft does far worse things to FOSS and now that Ballmer is expected to leave, the company will be able to do this with more impunity (if a CEO gets chosen from a minority ethic group and/or is female, that would not be surprising). Other topics of interest meriting blog posts are formerly sections of daily links; assuming it is sustainable (time-wise), we will cover surveillance, devices, copyright, lobbying, patents, operating systems, and pertinent software. Expansion of coverage is further defended by those who generously support the site financially (readers), so if you want to keep us strong for years to come, please consider making a contribution. Personal sacrifice cannot be gratis for a lifetime. Independent writing cost me a career. I do need support from readers, but I don’t wish to be seen as begging for support. In return for this support we will publish Stallman interviews until the end of the year (editing takes a lot of time) and post about 50 stories per week. My existing workstation is faulty (hardware issue since two days ago), so I will need to purchase a replacement shortly. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a coalition of pan-African networks, with members in 50 African countries and representing smallholder farmers, indigenous peoples and civil society, met in Addis Ababa 12-16th August 2013 to formulate an action plan to safeguard Africa’s sovereignty over its food, seeds and natural resources from the assault on Africa’s food systems.
Do corporations seek to maximize profits? Or do they seek to maximize power? The two may be complementary—wealth begets power, power begets wealth—but they’re not the same. One important difference is that profits can come from an expanding economic “pie,” whereas the size of the power pie is fixed. Power is a zero-sum game: more for me means less for you. And for corporations, the pursuit of power sometimes trumps the pursuit of profits.
There’s a kind of right-wing media criticism we’ve often called “working the refs.” The point is not to make complaints with a basis in reality; rather, the hope is that by complaining that your “side” isn’t getting a fair shake, someone in the media will want to avoid further scolding and so next time cut you break.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) annual meeting in Chicago earlier this month was marked by massive protests outside, but inside the walls of the Palmer House Hotel, the business of this notoriously secretive organization went forward as usual. The few quotes that have trickled out from inside the ALEC meeting are revealing.
In the decades that have followed, those struggling for justice are not the only ones who have rallied in Washington. CEOs from Wall Street and large corporations have of course been a powerful presence. They don’t march to Washington but instead fly in corporate jets. They don’t come with millions by their side, but rather with millions in their pockets. And they don’t come to demand greater inclusion and opportunity for all, but for more tax breaks for their businesses, to be paid for by cuts to services provided to ordinary families.
Today in Open Source: Is Linux boring? Plus: How to Find Android tablet apps, and Crunchbang Linux is a minimalist’s dream distro!
There are many people out there that want to start malware analysis and reverse engineering, but don’t know where to start, so this article intention is to show everybody interested in malware analysis a Linux lightweight distro for doing malware analysis with reverse engineering tools. This distribution is called REMnux, it is based on Ubuntu and it is maintained by Lenny Zelster, a business and tech leader with extensive experience in information technology and security.
As soon as Apple launched their Haswell-based MacBook Air I purchased the “ultrabook” for its long battery life, great build quality, and impressive design. However, running Linux on the 2013 MacBook Air has been a pain. It wasn’t running cleanly but it looks like the major kernel booting problem comes down to a UEFI interaction issue.
At the beginning I had plans to write one document, but later I understood that this document will be very big and I will write it very long time (having regard my current load). So I decided to write a several posts on this theme. This is the first post from the series. In this post I will concentrate on shortcomings of current GNU/Linux distros, in the second post I will try to write what should be done, to create a really usable GNU/Linux distro which can be a rival for proprietary systems.
The thought of using Linux as a manager in a highly Windows- and Mac-centric corporate environment isn’t something to be taken lightly. Integrating with Active Directory, wrangling email with Microsoft Exchange, and taming quirky Microsoft office documents can be a challenge even with a well-equipped Mac. I decided to make a change after using a Mac at Rackspace for six years.
Canonical is in talks with Dell on making a version of Ubuntu supported by the Chinese government available as a pre-installed OS on the PC maker’s upcoming products destined for the Chinese market.
Dell is a global partner for Canonical, and so the two companies are discussing using its Ubuntu Kylin OS in the future, said Leonard Tsai, Canonical’s Asia Pacific president, on Wednesday.
The next generation of applications will be smarter — with built-in data, mobile and social capabilities — and it will be built on private clouds that run on Linux servers, says Arvind Krishna, general manager of development and manufacturing in the Systems & Technology Group at IBM. What’s still unclear, however, is the business model for delivering these future applications, he says.
Twenty-one years after its introduction, Linux has reached unprecedented levels of deployment within enterprise environments, according to a recent study commissioned by enterprise Linux provider SUSE.
This week’s episode talks about the new verified teams paradigm for local community teams, mentions the release of 12.04.3, and talks about what is coming up at Ohio Linux Fest. Where the leader disappeared to over the weekend is also mentioned in passing.
The Linux Foundation, champion of all things open-source, has just announced a new collaboration with OpenBEL, an open-source platform for sharing scientific data.
Final release of Linux 3.11 is expected within a week, Torvalds said in a message echoing his 1991 post about the project
That made porting to further platforms far easier, and has helped drive the uptake of Linux across an incredible range of platforms, from supercomputers to smartphones to embedded systems – “just about anything else out there under the sun,” as Linus puts it. Had Linux remained trapped on the original Intel chipset, it would probably never have become the leading operating system it is today.
As Linus’ comments show, porting was never carried out with that aim in mind, and happened in an almost casual way. But then the same can be said about Linux in general, including that first, famously diffident post of 22 years ago.
Linux just turned 22 and the open source revolution it sparked is just getting started, two experts suggest.
Can the development model that is used to build Linux be extended for the life sciences? A new collaborative project will aim to answer that question.
The Linux Foundation is growing its roster of collaboration projects by expanding from the physical into the biological realm with the OpenBEL (Biological Expression Language). The Linux Foundation, best known as the organization that helps bring Linux vendors and developers together, is also growing its expertise as a facilitator for collaborative development projects.
The DRM compositor back-end for Wayland’s Weston now has a patch that provides hardware-accelerated screen capturing support by using VA-API with drivers that support this video decode/encode acceleration mechanism.
Linux is blessed with a good range of open source education software. The purpose of this article is to identify top notch open source software targeted at instructors and educational institutions. Educational establishments are constantly examining ways to reduce their overheads and save money, yet retain the delivery of high quality educational courses. Open source software solutions represent a way of fully embracing technology without causing a hole in the institution’s finances.
I admit I spend most of my time with pacman and its evil twin, yaourt. But neither of those is a real console application, for managing packages in Arch. yaourt might spice things up, but it’s no more a console “application” than pacman is.
SDG Systems announced today the expansion of their professional service offerings, including broad Android and Linux software development services. The services now offered for Android and Linux include operating system (OS) porting and customization, mobile app development and application porting. SDG has long been a leader in OS porting to rugged mobile computers. In June, 2013, SDG Systems completed the implementation of Android (AOSP) 4.1 (“Jelly Bean”) on the Trimble Juno T41 rugged mobile computer. The implementation included support for enhanced GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3.75G cellular voice and data, barcode scanning and other technologies. SDG Systems is a strategic partner with Trimble MCS for Android and offers in-depth Android technical support and consulting services.
WhatsApp and Viber are two of the finest and incredibly popular apps out there for Android. WhatsApp is my preferred way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Viber is not so far behind either. Since video and voice call features are also available in Viber, it’s a more complete package. Very recently, Viber team had made their desktop plans very clear and Windows and Mac version were released soon enough. Now its Linux’s turn, though Viber for Linux is available in 64 bit binaries only at the moment.
One of the features that Portage provides is to have post-processing done on request of the administrator for certain packages. For instance, for the dev-db/postgresql-server package we can call its pkg_config() phase to create the PostgreSQL instance and configure it so that the configuration of the database is stored in /etc/postgresql-9.2 rather than together with the data files.
Nordic Games has announced that the second chapter of The Raven: Legacy of A Master Thief entitled “Ancestry of Lies” is now available for PC, Mac and Linux.
Frogatto & Friends is an old-school 2D action/adventure platformer game, starring a certain quixotic frog. Give it a try! We’re trying to push 2D platforming, pixel-art, and music into uncharted territory.
Paranautical Activity the awesome looking FPS/Roguelike game from CodeAvarice is planning to add Co-Op multiplayer to jump in the game with friends! So this will make an already fun game far more awesome.
Enlightenment’s Wayland ambitions are becoming a reality with Enlightenment E19 set to support operating as its own Wayland compositor using some interesting technology.
From now on you can imagine that I’m starting every post with “I’ve fixed something”, since code works pretty stable, but sometimes I come across small issues and fix them.
In this article, I explain changes to the plugin loading mechanism in KDE Frameworks 5. The article is intended for a technical audience with some affinity to KDE development.
The latest Gnome Shell release vn 3.9.90 is the first 3.10 beta marking the feature work wrapping up and heading to code-freeze state.
The development team of Baobab (also known as Disk Usage Analyzer), a graphical utility to analyze disk usage in the GNOME desktop environment, announced a few days ago the immediate availability for download of the first Beta release of the upcoming Baobab 3.10 software.
I’m Emmanuele Bassi, and I’ve been working on GNOME and GNOME-related technologies for the past 10 years, both as a hobbyist and as a paid software engineer. I am part of the team working on the core GNOME platform (GLib, GTK+, and Clutter, plus other libraries); I have been elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors for three years and I’m currently working as its secretary. I am also lead architect for Endless Mobile, a start up using GNOME technology.
While traditionally the middle-click mouse button has been a convenient way to paste rather than Ctrl + V on Unix-like systems, GNOME designers are looking to change it up for their desktop.
The GNOME developers announced a few days ago that the first Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Settings Daemon 3.10 package, a daemon run by all GNOME sessions to provide live access to configuration settings and the changes done to them, is available for download and testing.
I was talking to Seif Lotfy at GUADEC about the gnome-music design, and this is a design proposal that has come out of that. It’s not proposing to add anything new, it’s just re-purposing the things that are already there.
GNOME’s burgeoning suite of core apps are making me excited for the future of the Linux desktop.
Controlling, changing settings, fine tuning and bringing the system closer to your needs is a vital thing and a point of special attention for Gnome users and developers. Gnome’s default tool for completing the important task of setting your system is constantly evolving to fit user needs and make our life easier with more options, better functionality and greater abilities.
With 29 days left untill version 3.10 gets officially released, we already have reached the point where it’s all about bug fixing from now on and what a better timing for us to revisit Gnome’s Goals situation, see what the stage of completion is and compare the data with what the situation was on the beginning of this year.
Manjaro 0.8.7 was released this morning, the latest update for the very nice and easy to use Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux.
Manjaro developers have been preparing for this release for the past two months and it was finally realized today.
On behalf of the Manjaro development team I’m happy to announce our new stable release of Manjaro Linux ‘Ascella’. The last two months was a blast for us. Summer feeling and good people helped us to put this one together.
The Core Update comes with a lot of feature enhancements for IPsec, smaller fixes for OpenVPN and fixed two denial-of-service attacks in the Squid web proxy.
Wallpaper contests are among my favorite things and today the OpenMandriva bunch announced the latest for their upcoming Lx release. The theme is “The Flavor of Freedom,” so warm up your GIMP, Inkscape, or whatever you use and get your submissions in.
In trading on Tuesday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) crossed below their 200 day moving average of $50.67, changing hands as low as $50.50 per share. Red Hat Inc shares are currently trading off about 1.9% on the day. The chart below shows the one year performance of RHT shares, versus its 200 day moving average:
I’m a words guy. This summer, I was an intern for the content team—part of the marketing services group at Red Hat. They kept me busy writing copy for ads, editing Red Hat content, brainstorming on different projects, and even scripting videos. They don’t have me writing like a businessman, but like the Shadowman.
Red Hat has carved out a strong reputation for its profitable Linux-focused strategy and the top-notch support it provides for enterprise customers, but there is no question that the company is betting on future growth in the cloud computing space. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is positioned to serve as the foundation for OpenStack-powered cloud deployments. Today Red Hat announced its new Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology.
Earlier this month I attended the first Fedora Flock, in Charleston, SC. This replaced the older Fedora Users and Developers conferences, none of which I had participated in prior. Other than certain difficulties with my return flight, this was a fun and interesting event, and I do hope Fedora has more of them going forward.
Despite the recent failure of the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding campaign, developers are still doing some neat things with Ubuntu mobile. Over at XDA Developers, some aspiring developers have managed to port the operating system on to the Sony Xperia Tablet Z. However, the developer does warn that it is a very experimental port of the OS, and encourages members to make backups before trying it out.
Its has been revealed this week that a copy of the Ubuntu Touch operating system has been successfully ported to the Sony Experia Z Tablet.
Last week we had a look at the LXLE 12.04.3 Paradigm Linux Distro, and now we thought you would be interested to learn more about the latest Ubuntu 12.04.3 system update, which you can see in the visual above.
The Ubuntu Edge project didn’t reach its goal of collecting 32 million dollars to finance the production of their smartphone but Canonical is nevertheless congratulated on the response they received.
How many people really pledged for a phone? And was offering an $820 phone for $600 at the start a good or bad idea?
Canonical has a very dedicated team building the Mir display server, and they are updating it on a constant basis. Version 0.0.10 has just been released.
Canonical promised that Mir would be available as default for the released of Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) and now the company is searching testers that are willing to improve the overall experience.
App Grid is a new lightweight Ubuntu Software alternative that tries to make application discovery easier by using a grid view which includes app screenshots and ratings.
My experience with Ubuntu started in 2007 when i was doing the internship of my second year in Computer Engineering, the first week was really boring, the second week and while i was trying to fix the DVD driver, i opened the drawer then i found a Green CD of “OpenSUSE”, i booted with the live CD, the OS was a bit complicated and not easy to play with.
Unity is the graphical environment that we ship in a default Ubuntu installation. Released for the first time about three years ago, Unity is focused on simplicity and consistency across multiple devices. In this article I am going to cover the history of Unity and how Unity 8 is driving a new era of code and design convergence in Ubuntu.
I have installed a week ago with Elementary Luna, if you like GNU/Linux operating Linux, then you should have heard about Elementary Luna but if not, I will tell you that Elementary Luna is a new GNU/Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu 12.04, the last Long term Ubuntu released.
Win Enterprises announced a Mini-ITX single-board computer for digital imaging and other embedded applications, built around quad- and dual-core AMD Embedded R-Series APUs clocked at up to 2GHz. The Linux-friendly MB-73330 SBC features up to 16GB of DDR3 RAM, three HDMI ports and a DisplayPort, dual SATA 6.0 ports, eight USBs, dual gigabit Ethernet, and multiple PCIe and Mini-PCIe expansion options.
Aaeon announced the availability of a Linux-friendly PC/104-Plus single board computer based on the AMD 615MHz G-Series T16R processor.
A Samsung executive confirmed to The Korea Times that it will unveil its Galaxy Gear smartwatch on Sept. 4, along with the Galaxy Note 3 phablet, but quashed rumors of a flexible display. The Android-powered smartwatch, rumored to include a dual-core processor and a camera, will be the first of many Samsung and Apple smartwatches that will lead a surging 36 million unit a year market by 2018, predicts Juniper Research.
We don’t know what number or name the next version of Android will be, but if all signs are pointing in the right direction we’ll likely see Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie here soon from Google. There’s no question they’re hard at work on the next major release, possibly set for later this year, and today we’re seeing some interesting tidbits on the Kernel side.
Intel has released the Intel C++ Compiler v13.0 for Android OS, its first attempt at delivering an optimizing C/C++ compiler designed specifically for Google’s mobile platform.
One of the big selling points of the Android ecosystem is that the operating system is open source. That means handset manufacturers can modify it to work on their handsets and tablets, or enterprising individuals can customize it to work on their own hardware.
Complaints of stricture over structure, signs of technical prowess on the wane — the best days of the Apache Software Foundation may be behind
Apache is great for many things, not so for others. Its proponents misunderstand its weaknesses, and its detractors misunderstand its strengths
I have always been interested in science, technology and (most of all) computers. These are things that I always loved, even though they were sometimes difficult. I loved math and science class in school; I read science-fiction and fantasy novels in all of my spare time. I was the nerdy kid at school that was bullied and mocked. It would have been so easy to just give in and be “like everyone else”. I could have stopped reading. I could have played more sports.
[...]
This is the sentiment that drove me into my open source career.
Ask just about any person you meet whether they are using open source software (OSS) and the chances are good you will be met by a blank stare. Yet, people might be surprised when you tell them that they are either using it on the mobile device they own or on their social media platform of choice.
The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) promises to enable an agile infrastructure that’s orchestratable through automated policies. Avaya is now formally defining its approach to SDDC, which will make use of the open source OpenStack cloud platform.
This year the LibreOffice Conference will take place in Milano, Italy. Come and join us for this excepional event from the 25th to the 27th of September 2013. Learn about migrations to LibreOffice, LibreOffice existing deployments, writing extensions and much more. Participate in hacking sessions and community workshops and most of all, meet the LibreOffice community face to face for a few days of exchange and fun!
Shai Reshef dreams of making quality education affordable and accessible to everyone, and he sees the Internet as the road to get there. Reshef is the founder of University of the People (UoPeople), which bills itself as the world’s first tuition-free, degree-granting, non-profit online university.
GCL has moved to the git version control system. The 2.6.8 and 2.6.9 branches and tags are identical in cvs and git. Henceforward, modifications will be made to git only. As of the present writing, git contains a merge of experimental into master, and a port of most 2.6.x improvements into master. This will form the basis of a 2.7.0 release sometime in the future.
The FSF is pleased to announce that we can begin accepting GPG-signed assignments from contributors residing in the United States.
This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
It’s been 30 years since the GNU manifesto was penned. What began as frustration over a printer driver has grown into a massive social movement. The GNU system itself has exploded; not only is it a fully free operating system, but it has expanded to include an entire universe of software. Now, GNU is on the threshold of another amazing leap, and we want you to be a part of it.
Beyond making a whole lot of Intel X.Org driver changes and some recent yet-to-be-merged performance improvements, Chris Wilson has put out a new release of the Cairo graphics library.
The Calligra team has released version 2.7.2, the first of the bugfix releases of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active in the 2.7 series. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.7.1 and we recommend everybody to update.
I am fully occupied this week and the next with training my new helpdesk team, so it took me a bit by surprise when Willy Sudiarto Raharjo tweeted that there was a version 1.0 of Calibre since this morning. Kovid Goyal, developer of Calibre, published the news in a blog post. It’s nearly seven years since Kovid started with Calibre – this was the time when the first E-ink based ereader device, SONY PRS-500, hit the market. At first, Calibre was merely a library which was able to convert e-book formats into Sony’s LRF format. It got ‘upgraded’ with a graphical user interface to manage Kovid’s growing ebook library.
The Australian government is seeing a lot more demand for open-source support, according to chief technology officer John Sheridan.
David Bollier is no stranger to politics. The author, activist and independent commons scholar worked for Ralph Nader in the late-’70s and early-’80s, he’s a policy strategist and he has participated in or founded numerous public interest projects. But, over the years, he found himself increasingly disillusioned with political activism.
PHP is not a young language. As of 2013, it’s 18 years old; that’s old enough to vote. Many upstart languages have appeared over the years to try and unseat PHP as the “lingua franca” of web applications but it still commands over 80% of the web market. One reason for PHP’s popularity is no doubt the ease with which new developers can get started with it, but just as important is the fact that PHP has been evolving for all those 18 years.
Github is a nice site, and I routinely monitor a couple of projects there.
When the Google ChromeCast was announced it was an instant hit and all the units were ‘sold’ immediately. One of the core features of ChromeCast was the ability to play local content. This $35 device seemed to hold much more potential than the AppleTV and other such devices the market.
Groklaw is “truly the canary in the coal mine,” suggested blogger Martin Espinoza. “When it is no longer possible to tell the truth online sufficiently for it to exist, none of us have the freedom of speech. The corporations which have bought our government are in the process of buying our silence and obedience as well, and the cost is turning out to be remarkably low.”
Your ideas are stolen… from someone else.
We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development.
The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown.
Horrific scenes of dead and injured civilians in Syria have been a part of the conflict there over the past several years, but the reports of a chemical attack of some sort last week in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta have led U.S. policymakers and the Obama White House to threaten to attack in a matter of days.
“The task is not done, the journey is not complete,” said Martin Luther King III on Saturday’s 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.
A small GOP lobby shop tied to the Tea Party and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, and which was active in the state’s recent recall elections, was awarded $500,000 in taxpayer dollars in what some are calling a backdoor, sweetheart deal cooked up by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair, outgoing Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder.
facebook_logo-300x99Today Facebook has published it’s first transparency report, detailing law enforcement and national security requests from countries around the world. Britain requested data on 1,975 occasions, covering 2,337 users. In 32% of cases, Facebook declined to provide any data.
…comparing the release of classified information about government spying to the assassination of Martin Luther King…
Some media figures applaud the criminalization of investigative reporting
Good news for Auckland and other major cities
Summary: The island which shares patent woes with Europe is successfully steering politicians in the right direction, albeit loopholes remain for exploitation
The fight over software patents in New Zealand ended with an outcome not as bad as we feared after Foss had tried to legalise software patents. Following backlash from the public and from local companies he changed his tune completely:
New Zealand has finally passed a new Patents Bill that will effectively outlaw software patents after five years of debate, delay and intense lobbying from multinational software vendors.
Aptly-named Commerce Minister Craig Foss welcomed the modernisation of patents law, saying it marked a “significant step towards driving innovation in New Zealand”.
“By clarifying the definition of what can be patented, we are giving New Zealand businesses more flexibility to adapt and improve existing inventions, while continuing to protect genuine innovations,” Foss said.
Loopholes for software patents endure. But still, it’s no worse than before. Pogson said “Governments shouldn’t have to do this. It’s obvious that software is obvious and subject to copyright. Software has to be obvious or stupid computes wouldn’t be able to figure out what has to be done. Software is obvious like telephone books and recipes are obvious. They are not innovative in that they are just a sequence of data and instructions with myriad combinations. Software is subject to copyright. That’s the right way to protect the developer’s ideas.”
In Europe we share the same problem as NZ. While software patents are not ‘officially’ allowed some companies continue to be granted piles of them. Some would be useless in court though and the patent holders know that. █
Summary: Patent trolls, which are only a small part of the patent problem, are trying to challenge initiatives that fight them, led by monstrous troll Intellectual Ventures
The world’s biggest patent troll, the Microsoft- and Gates-backed Intellectual Ventures, is getting desperate to classify itself as something other than patent troll because of coming changes that are supposed to stop trolls. This one troll alone will spend $1 million lobbying the government and Joe Mullin says that this “World’s biggest “patent troll” has grown to 800 employees, 70,000 patents.”
Steph, the Troll Tracker, comments about this troll. She does not think that much will change:
I’ll absolutely grant that the SHIELD Act is not going to do much good. It’s rare that I agree with a troll, but I’m woman enough to admit it when it happens. Kudos for recognizing that legislation isn’t the panacea (whose got a thesaurus now, huh?) we want it to be.
One thing I intensely dislike is when people use the “but the other guy is worse” excuse for their own poor behavior. Bad behavior is rarely relative. This is the approach IV is talking about here.
What needs to be widely recognised is that the patent problem is not the troll problem, it is a lot more than that. Here is a new article which puts it in perspective. Bear in mind that some trolls serve large companies, but the opposite is not true, so the figure below might actually be lower than 20%.
Patent trolls’ live to sue — but they only file 20% of patent suits
One of Silicon Valley’s favorite hobbies is complaining endlessly about the rise of “patent trolls” and how they’re destroying innovation.
And by patent troll, we mean a company that doesn’t make anything but just owns a bunch of patents and uses them to sue the pants off real companies that make real products and employ real people.
Obama promises to crack down on trolls because they’re a nuisance to the corporations which control the White House and by extension the nation. Some trolls got large enough that they can spend millions on lobbying to derail laws or bills which are against them. As one new article puts it, Apple is the company most targeted by patent trolls, which is why trolls and not patents are targeted by the White House (GAO recently pointed this out). To quote the new article which references a lawyer:
Apple, HP and Samsung have been attacked the most by so-called “patent trolls” within the last five years, a Silicon Valley lawyer said Tuesday. But recent legislative activity may be weakening their power.
The reason that Obama is going after trolls is not that he is trying to help good causes, he is just trying to help corporations like the above while even annulling court decisions against them (Apple). Given the way this administration is run, lobbying by what became a corporation of trolling (IV) can actually render even reform on trolls ineffective. Just wait and watch how money talks in Washington. █
Summary: Some of the latest self-explanatory stories about NSA abuses which are gradually embraced by politicians, corporations, and even state police; attempts to change the law to criminalise the acts of revealing these abuses
THE NSA‘S criminal activities are a phenomenon that keeps giving. Stories about it have been told for months and there’s no stopping it. Clever mechanisms like effective encryption inside chat and insurance files show just why the government hates encryption so much (not fake encryption which gives the mere illusion of privacy).
Some of the latest assorted story (below, not grouped by type) help reinforce the argument that terrorism — however one defines it –is not what the NSA fights against. The NSA is shown time after time to have engaged in strategic espionage, sometimes even inside the United States (where different rules apply).
This happens to coincide with media propaganda which tries to sell a war on Syria to the public (the war inside Syria has already been shown to be at least partly fuelled by the CIA). The UN is doing what it did 11 years ago in Iraq, trying to identify if there are weapons of mass destruction which merit invasion by other nations and now we know that the UN was among the victims of espionage (by the NSA). Moreover, recall US attempts to ban encryption in Syria (desperate and futile measures targeting FOSS repositories). This helps show the massive power of the NSA, which can also start wars. Jacob Appelbaum was right about it. In the wake of site shutdowns it is said in relation to Groklaw that:
Internet surveillance must be stopped or rendered ineffective with encryption
Yes, but laws are being passed to criminalise some anonymisation tactics. Other laws are now being proposed in the UK for criminalising reports about the NSA. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
America’s National Security Agency has been hit by fresh allegations of spying after Germany’s Der Spiegel accused it of illegally spying on the UN in New York for a year.
Agents succeeded in getting into the UN video conferencing system and cracking its coding, according to leaked secret documents.
Peer Steinbrück says he will delay negotiations until US comes clean on bugging of German government offices
Research shows that indiscriminate monitoring fosters distrust, conformity and mediocrity
New details about innocent Americans targeted for surveillance by undercover officers.
EU could make solid data protection regulations, but in the midst of debates it is becoming obvious that European political leaders aren’t willing to take serious steps in this direction, an MEP from the Swedish Pirate Party, Amelia Andersdotter, told RT.
World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers tells the UK government its actions could threaten press freedom
The US National Security Agency (NSA) had bugged the United Nations’ New York headquarters, Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly said on Sunday in a report on US spying that could further strain relations between Washington and its allies.
Citing secret US documents obtained by fugitive former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel said the files showed how the United States systematically spied on other states and institutions.
The NSA paid millions to compensate companies’ surveillance costs, new documents claim
US fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden stayed in Moscow in late June and did not fly to Cuba because Cuban authorities would have denied him landing under US pressure, Russian newspaper Kommersant reports.
Acting in collaboration with the CIA, the daily claims that a “Special Collection Service-Team” makes use of equipment installed on the roof of the Vienna embassy to intercept communications, and in particular communications from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Neither the IAEA, or the Austrian Ministry of the Interior were willing to confirm this information…
Most of the focus on NSA surveillance has been the domestic fallout from the Obama Administration spying on ordinary Americans and then lying repeatedly about it. The international fallout is significant, however, with key US allies like Germany and Brazil taking the revelation of systematically being targeted poorly.
Public outrage over the federal government’s surveillance programs reached a fever pitch last week, with revelations that the National Security Administration illegally collected tens of thousands of non-terrorism-related emails from U.S. citizens, in clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. With no end to the NSA bombshells in sight, at least some members of Congress appear to have grudgingly accepted that they are going to have to do something about the government’s expansive spying programs.
On July 30, 2013, I had the pleasure of having dinner with General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency. Just a few weeks earlier, NYU Law Professor Christopher Sprigman and I had called the NSA’s activities “criminal” in the digital pages of the New York Times, so I thought it was particularly gracious of him to sit with me.
[...]
Liberty and security are the hard-won results of democratic process and limited government power. A system of mass surveillance puts innocent people at risk, and is, in itself, an abuse of liberty. Inevitably, it leads to further abuses. When the justification is counter-terrorism, and that’s your only concern, there is no countervailing interest that justifies slowing you down or stopping you. We are only beginning to learn all the ways in which good men are nevertheless failing to withstand the corrupting force of vast spying abilities. Indeed, the FISA court noted in that 2011 opinion that the government’s collection of tens of thousands of purely domestic communications, hidden from the court for years, could be a crime. (Footnote 15) The good people at NSA have literally pulverized the Fourth Amendment, government accountability, freedom of expression, rule of law, and so many other equally critical components of the American system.
The NSA whistleblower says: ‘I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent’
Anti-terror laws should be strengthened to prevent leaks of official secrets, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Blair has told the BBC.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that documents supplied by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prove the NSA spied on internal communications at the United Nations headquarters in New York City during the summer of 2012. The NSA has also targeted the European Union and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to Der Spiegel .
Summary: Companies have an appetite for GNU/Linux and FOSS talent, suggest some new data points
As one who works exclusively with GNU/Linux (even at my daytime job) I can attest to the experience of relative security when your skills go beyond using Microsoft Windows and Office. Based on three new articles (see below [1-3]), not just a personal anecdote supports this seemingly optimistic claim. It sure seems like despite economic pains there are good job prospects for those who master the already-dominant and ever-growing platform.
“This is the spirit of innovation and this is where innovation is typically derived from.”As [4,5] help show, more startups like Google use GNU/Linux to get started and expand to large scale. So even those who are not in the workforce of others (contracted) can do their own thing with little initial capital. This is the spirit of innovation and this is where innovation is typically derived from. It also contributes to personal and professional freedom. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
For the last couple of years, the HostGator billboards have been all over the place.
“Do you know Linux…? We are hiring.
If you want a tech job, you want to be in Linux and open source software. Because that’s where the employers are slathering to find qualified personnel. And they want you.
There I was, at perhaps the biggest hard-core, open source conference of them all these days, OSCon. The buzz was that everyone, and I mean everyone, was looking to hire. So I thought to myself, “Are they really?” I set about asking every OSCon exhibitor, more than a hundred of them, if they were indeed looking for new staff and ready to make job offers.
Smartbear.com says employers are chomping at the bit to hire people with Linux and open source skills.
This is pretty insane. A group of Silicon Valley-based Linux hackers are crafting a new operating system, not for personal computers, or smartphones, or even tablets, but for the servers that underpin the entire internet.
And prison sentences, too
Summary: What really would have happened if there was justice in this world; bankrupt Microsoft, executives with long jail sentences, rapid restoration of fair competition
Microsoft is pretty much forced to ‘cooperate” with a probe over its bribery tactics, which Microsoft is seemingly trying to hide by distraction. To quote The Register, “Microsoft says it will cooperate with US investigators probing alleged bribery of foreign officials. It’s claimed Redmond’s resellers bunged cash to apparatchiks in Russia and Pakistan in return for contracts with state-backed businesses.”
As Pogson put it:
Ever wondered why M$ manages to sell licences to all kinds of folks even when GNU/Linux is a better option, with a lower price, better performance and fewer problems? It just may be that big businesses, governments, schools, and organizations that have large numbers of system, are being manipulated by a few well-placed bribes.
Remember EDGI and remember what Microsoft did to government and schools in Russia. It is a serious case of corruption, even by Chinese and Russian standards.
As put by Nokia observer Tomi Ahonen the othe day, “I have tried to be ‘fair’ and ‘open-minded’ about Microsoft in my writing and on this blog. However, this is the tech company with the nickname ‘The Evil Empire’. That term comes with plenty of cause – over the past three decades Microsoft has been fined countless times huge sums for crushing competitors with illegal methods, using its monopolistic position like a bully. I personally have been a user, supporter, registered developer, and/or authorized trainer for many of the various victims of Microsoft from WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 to Novell Netware, Mosaic and Netscape.”
Here is part 2. Microsoft apologists may say that “Ballmer Successor Must Apologize to Partners”, but we don’t agree. Microsoft should apologise and also compensate its rivals which it bribed against, even if that means the immediate bankruptcy of Microsoft (they should pull out more money — earned by criminal activities — from bank accounts of Microsoft executives past and present, including Gates and Ballmer).
Sadly, given false (or mutually similar) choices offered by the corporate media, this perfectly legitimate option is rendered “not worth entertaining”; big banks show this to be the norm. Those who commit crime, even if caught, are made the richest and most powerful people, hence they can continue to harm society and whitewash their reputation. █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
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