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07.25.15

Vista 10 Not Ready, But Released Anyway

Posted in Vista 10, Windows at 1:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Despite severe technical issues in the rushed-out-the-door Vista 10, Microsoft decides to stick with the deadline, only days after reporting billions of dollars in losses

VISTA 10 media SPAM is already everywhere, not just in Microsoft advocacy sites. Microsoft AstroTurfers and PR agencies, respectively, inject the subject into forums and pressure people in the media to write about it in many languages. Microsoft wants to sell us perceptions and it pretends that Vista 10 is “free”, “best ever”, “secure”, and so on.

“Microsoft is trying to rescue the business by going into GNU/Linux-dominated areas, not just mobile devices but also servers.”Andrew Orlowski, a very provocative (at times even trollish) writer, chastises Vista 10 and says that when it comes to mobile devices, it’s “going nowhere fast”. Even people inside Microsoft tell me that Vista 10 is not ready. It’s basically just a brand and many hardware companies don’t care enough to make their products compatible with it. This is going to hurt Microsoft’s bottom line, just as Vista did nearly a decade ago. History repeats itself. Vista too was rushed out the door; Orlowski says it’s the same with Vista 10 and people inside Microsoft tell me that it still crashes a lot (screens of death). It’s well past the prototyping stage, but it still has that Microsoft ‘quality’ to it. Microsoft announced some days ago that it had been losing billions of dollars. The decline of Windows had a lot to do with it and Microsoft knows that the common carrier is where the company must put all its of eggs (without Windows dominance, Office too ceases to matter because it relies on format monoculture). Microsoft cannot hide the losses anymore. To quote a new comment from Needs Sunlight: “Speculating on two explanations which could be about carrying the 1998 debt, it could be that M$ trying to write off some of that debt now. Or it could be that it has carried that debt as long as it can and can no longer keep it hidden and things are blowing up.”

Microsoft is trying to rescue the business by going into GNU/Linux-dominated areas, not just mobile devices but also servers. Don’t call it ‘cloud’, as it serves to mislead and it usually means surveillance. IDG shamelessly promotes ASP.Net and some British media promotes Microsoft mail loss on the 'cloud' as if Microsoft belongs in E-mail, where GNU/Linux and Free software are already dominant and vastly more reliable (Windows plays a role only in pumping SPAM into mail servers). At Microsoft-friendly circles, Microsoft boosters pretend that Microsoft is ‘buddies’ with GNU/Linux (which it is still attacking in many ways), but as we explained the other day, that's just Microsoft trying to take over the competition because Microsoft is losing in a very big way.

Vista 10 will not be a success story but more like a semi-functional system update for Vista 7/8 with newer back doors (more on that in our next post) and decade-old GNU/Linux features, which Microsoft arrogantly copied and now markets as ‘innovations’. █

Links 25/7/2015: Plasma Mobile, Linux Mint 17.2 OEM

Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source, adaptable infrastructure key to Etsy platform business model

    For an emerging platform business model, information technology may not top the owner’s agenda. Building a community and setting the ground rules for participation and conflict resolution are often the first priority. IT, however, tends to become a higher priority as a platform scales and matures. That’s been the case for Etsy, which was founded in 2005. Today, Etsy’s technology infrastructure plays a critical role in the current stage of the platform’s evolution.

    [...]

    Etsy is largely built on open source technology, according to Allspaw. At its core, the company’s platform stack includes PHP and MySQL, Hadoop and Scalding, and Solr/Lucerne/ElasticSearch, he explained.

  • It’s Been A Great Month So Far For Open-Source/Linux Users

    Besides the open-source Mesa finally hitting OpenGL 4.0+, Vulkan being right on the horizon, there being Skylake just around the corner, AMD R9 Fury Linux benchmarks coming next week, and Intel Skylake being days away, there’s been many other exciting announcements so far this month and milestones for free software.

  • IFTTT joins the open source community

    Harnessing the power of apps, devices, and the cloud, IFTTT has just unveiled five open source projects. Now available on GitHub, the projects can be used by anyone to integrate IFTTT automation in their apps and services.

  • Tech Giants Boost Open Source Container Collaboration

    CNCF’s role is to foster developer and operator collaboration on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services, said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation — that is, applications or services that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and micro services-oriented. To ease the process, CNCF aims to drive alignment among technologies and platforms.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Nightlies Are Now Built with GTK+3, Coming For Firefox 42

        As of this commit yesterday, by Mike Hommey, Firefox nightly builds are now being built with PLATFORM_DEFAULT_TOOLKIT set to cairo-gtk3! It would appear, according to the commit tag, that mainline Firefox will be built with GTK+3 for Firefox 42. Firefox 42 is expected to be released this November.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Hadoop Summit

    • Getting friendly with open source: Big Data firm liberates proprietary chokeholds

      Enterprise customers could consider open source as the solution to their problems. According to Anand Venugopal, Impetus’ head of real-time stream analytics platform StreamAnalytix, “People have become so friendly to open source, and they have been waiting to be liberated from the hold of proprietary vendors that they are positively biased toward open source-oriented technology.”

      Discussing a recent use-case scenario, Kankariya said, “The guy was looking for his problem to be solved; he doesn’t care if it’s Hadoop or NoSQL or whatever.” This openness has allowed Impetus to become a trusted partner and advisor for customers that want to “cross-learn from across the ecosystem.”

    • Squeezing more value out of data

      Cloudera, Inc.’s Todd Laurence, director, global partner sales, and Michael Crutcher, director of product management, joined theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s Media team, at Hadoop Summit 2015 to discuss how Cloudera’s close relationship with EMC is benefiting its Isilon scale-out NAS storage customers and “bringing analytics to data where it lives today in EMC Isilon.”

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.2 Gets Ready for Production Use, Release Candidate 1 Out for Testing

      The FreeBSD Project announced a few minutes ago that the first Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.2 operating system is now available for download and testing through the usual channels.

    • FreeBSD 10.2-RC1 Released

      This latest development milestone for FreeBSD 10.2 has fixes for ZFS, Xen, SSH, pkg, and many other key components. Besides being offered for i386, amd64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, and SPARC64, there are also ARM spins for popular development boards from the RaspberryPi B to BeagleBone and PandaBoard.

    • LLVM 3.7 RC1 Ready For Testing By Developers

      One week after tagging LLVM 3.7-RC1, Hans Wennborg of Google announced its formal release on Thursday.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • ODI announces winners Open Data Awards 2015

        Earlier this month, the Open Data Institute held its Open Data Awards ceremony at Bloomberg’s London office, where ODI founders Sirs Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt presented this year’s winners.

    • Open Hardware

      • SketchUp’s Open-Source 3D-Printable WikiHouse Snaps Together Like Lego Bricks

        What if you could assemble your house like Legos using free modeling software and a 3D printer? That’s the idea behind Eric Schimelpfening‘s WikiHouse – a home designed entirely in SketchUp that can be downloaded by anyone, customized to fit the user’s needs and sent to the 3D printer. The components are then snapped together using less than 100 screws to make rooms that can be rearranged as easily as you would rearrange furniture.

  • Programming

    • PHP 7.0 Beta 2 Released

      Just two weeks after PHP 7 decided to go into beta, the second beta release is now available for testing.

      If you’ve been living under a rock, PHP 7.0 is slated to deliver much greater performance over PHP 5.6 (as much as 2x or more), consistent 64-bit support, various new language features, better handling of fatal errors, and other changes.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • ISO updates ODF document standard

      The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has updated the ODF open document format standard for office application. ODF version 1.2 was published on 17 June.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Researchers Enlist Machine Learning In Malware Detection

      In 100 milliseconds or less, researchers are now able to determine whether a piece of code is malware or not — and without the need to isolate it in a sandbox for analysis.

    • The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn’t

      Get your facts straight before reporting, is the main takeaway from Peter Hansteen’s latest piece, The OpenSSH Bug That Wasn’t. OpenSSH servers that are set up to use PAM for authentication and with a very specific (non-default on OpenBSD and most other places) setup are in fact vulnerable, and fixing the configuration is trivial.

    • VUPEN Founder Launches New Zero-Day Acquisition Firm Zerodium

      In the weeks since the Hacking Team breach, the spotlight has shone squarely on the small and often shadowy companies that are in the business of buying and selling exploits and vulnerabilities. One such company, Netragard, this week decided to get out of that business after its dealings with Hacking Team were exposed. But now there’s a new entrant in the field, Zerodium, and there are some familiar names behind it.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Hundreds of never-before-seen photos of Bush and Cheney on 9/11 released by National Archives

      The National Archives on Friday released more than 350 never-before seen photos of former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, along with top members of the Bush administration, on Sept. 11, 2001, as they reacted to the most deadly attack in terrorism in American history.

    • Ex US Intelligence Want the Truth from White House who Shot Down MH17

      On Tuesday, the Ukrainian government refused to release an international report on the disaster, intensifying widespread concerns that it pointed to Ukrainian rather than Russian or rebel culpability in the crash.

    • Saudi-led coalition airstrikes kill more than 120 in Yemen

      Saudi-led coalition airstrikes killed more than 120 civilians and wounded more than 150 after shelling a residential area in the Yemeni province of Taiz on Friday evening, security officials, medical officials and witnesses said.

      The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters, said that most of the houses in the area were leveled and a fire broke out in the port city of Mokha. Most of the corpses, including children, women and elderly people, were charred by the flames, they said.

    • John Carlin Complains that ISIL Is Targeting Same Youth FBI Is

      I’m reviewing some of the videos from the Aspen Security Forum. This one features DOJ Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin and CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass.

      I’m including it here so you can review Carlin’s complaints in the first part of the video. He explains to Ken Dilanian that ISIL’s recruiting strategy is different from Al Qaeda’s in that they recruit the young and mentally ill. He calls them children, repeatedly, but points to just one that involved a minor. 80% are 40 and under, 40% are 21 and under. In other words, he’s mostly complaining that ISIL is targeting young men who are in their early 20s. He even uses the stereotype of a guy in his parents’ basement, interacting on social media without them knowing.

      Carlin, of course, has just described FBI’s targeting strategy for terrorist stings, where they reach out to young men — many with mental disabilities — over social media, only then to throw an informant or undercover officer at the target, to convince him to press the button that (the target believes) will detonate a bomb — though of course the bomb is an FBI-supplied inert bomb.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Why Hong Kong is the only Asian hub for global media

      Hong Kong is definitely the Asian hub of the global news industry.

    • Assange says WikiLeaks is “drowning in material now”
    • Julian Assange on WikiLeaks’ Comeback: ‘We Are Drowning in Material’
    • SPIEGEL Interview with Julian Assange: ‘We Are Drowning in Material’

      In an interview, Julian Assange, 44, talks about the comeback of the WikiLeaks whistleblowing platform and his desire to provide assistance to a German parliamentary committee that is investigating mass NSA spying.

    • Hillary Clinton likely ‘mishandled’ secrets because too much is classified

      The minute that private email server Hillary Clinton used for work emails as Secretary of State became a controversy, it was clear that evidence would surface showing that classified information passed through that address – despite her repeated denials.

      Of course there was “secret” information in her emails – but not because she had attempted to cover up smoking gun Benghazi emails like conspiracy-addled Republicans hoped. It’s because the US classification system is so insanely bloated and out of control that virtually everything related to foreign policy and national security is, in some way or another, classified.

      And now it’s finally happened: the New York Times reported late Thursday that two internal government watchdogs have recommended that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Clinton’s private email account, because the cache of 55,000 emails from her now-deleted server reportedly include “hundreds of potentially classified emails”.

    • The Declining Half-Life of Secrets

      The nature of secrets is changing. The “half-life of secrets” is declining sharply for many intelligence activities as secrets that in the past may have been kept successfully for 25 years or more, are now exposed well before.

      For evidence, one need look no further than the 2015 breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), of personnel records for 22 million U.S. government employees and family members. OPM is just one instance in a long string of high-profile breaches, where hackers have gained access to personal information, trade secrets, or classified government material. The focus of the discussion needs to be on complementary trends in information technology, including the continuing effects of Moore’s Law, the sociology of the information technology community, and changed sources and methods for signals intelligence, all of which increase the likelihood that government secrets will not remain secret for long.

      An age where secrets become known sooner, means that “the front-page” test will become far more important to decision-makers. Even if a secret operation is initially successful, the expected costs of disclosure become higher as the average time to disclosure decreases.

  • Finance

    • Elizabeth Warren 1, Wall Street Clown 0

      On this week’s podcast, we look back on Elizabeth Warren ripping apart a rip-off artist from Primerica, break down the latest effort to pass a highway funding bill, and explain why a former NSA chief is talking to a bunch of fruit growers.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Side-By-Side Coverage of Cuba and Iran Highlights Shift in US Media Villain-Making

      US relations with Cuba have had a significant time to relax, and clearly there is a still a long way to go with Iran, which George W. Bush famously included as a member of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address (White House Archives, 1/29/02). One might wonder, however, were the US media to grant the same kind of legitimacy to Iranian perspectives as it now does to Cuba’s, whether that latter number might tick up.

    • Megyn Kelly’s Response To The Louisiana Theater Shooting Was To Speculate About An ISIS Connection

      Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly responded to breaking news of a deadly shooting at a Louisiana movie theater by baselessly asking about possible connections to ISIS or radical Islam.

    • Politico Finds ‘Capital of American Jihad’–Based on 2 Cases, 6 Years and 268 Miles Apart

      In his piece “Tennessee Is the Capital of American Jihad,” author and “War on Terror” think-tanker James Kitfield sets out to draw a connection between the the recent Chattanooga shooter Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez and the case of Carlos Bledsoe, who shot up a recruiting station in Arkansas in 2009. The fact that both attacked recruiting stations, both lived in Tennessee and both were Muslim is apparently enough to make Tennessee the “Capital of American Jihad.”

    • Who Is Frank Luntz, The Guy Trying To Quietly Change Your Mind About Republicans?

      On Saturday, at the 2015 Family Leadership Summit, an event which showcases Republican candidates, Donald Trump gave a notorious interview in which he discussed John McCain’s military record. Trump said, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” His interviewer cut him off twice and and asked what he thought again. Suddenly, Trump said McCain was a war hero multiple times, creating a debate about whether Trump meant that McCain is a war hero because being captured is heroic or that McCain only got hero status because he was captured, not because he was doing anything special. Amazingly, Trump got a standing ovation — and his interviewer, Frank Luntz, knew exactly what he was doing.

      Luntz is not a journalist. He is not a fellow politician or a Republican Party executive. He is a pollster who specializes in language, and though you might not have heard of him, the Republican candidates certainly have. He knows what words to use to make you like them more.

  • Censorship

    • Sri Lanka: Colombo Telegraph facing censorship despite presidential promise

      The Colombo Telegraph, Sri Lanka’s most iconoclastic investigative news website, is gearing up for this year’s second national election. And once again they face the threat of censorship — despite a presidential promise to bring it to an end.

      January’s polls saw the website blocked to domestic voters by order of authoritarian incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Unseated by shock winner Maithripala Sirisena, one of the victor’s first acts after the vote was to lift the official banning order.

    • Universal’s agents send Google a censorship demand for “127.0.0.1″

      127.0.0.1 is the “loopback” address for your Internet stack, the address you tell your computer to visit when you want it to talk to itself.

      Links to 127.0.0.1 just go to your own computer — it’s like asking your computer to knock on its own door. Not understanding this is directly analogous to not being able to find your own ass with both hands.

    • Michigan Needs a New Voice: Challenging Censorship in the Wolverine State

      Earlier this year, the faculty advisor to Northern Michigan University’s college newspaper was outed for encouraging her students to file public records requests and draw attention to acts of secrecy performed by university administration. Noting that public records requests are legal and even encouraged as per Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, it is unnerving to know that the accomplishments and reputations of our nation’s finest journalism educators can be undermined in the name of image control. But the Marquette-based college is not alone; the Rochester Talon, the nationally recognized and award-winning student newspaper of Rochester High School in Oakland County, has been subjected to prior review by school administration since January, when–in an attempt to raise awareness about changing smoking trends among students of legal smoking age–it ran a photo (shown below) of a teenager (lawfully, and in an off-campus location) smoking a hookah pen. The school administration’s swift retaliation made certain that no journalist would again dare attempt to inform the school community about an issue of social concern.

    • Turkey’s press council says censorship still in place

      Turkey’s Press Council has said censorship is still in place in Turkey, adding the country ranked 149th among 199 countries in press freedom reports, with 21 journalists in jail and a large number of ongoing cases filed against journalists, in a written statement issued to mark the 107th anniversary of Journalists Day.

    • Israeli artists sound alarm over growing censorship

      According to local filmmakers, the recent suppression of documentary Beyond The Fear is just one episode in a quickening erosion of artistic freedom in Israel.

      As Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre began to roll on the opening night of the Jerusalem Film Festival in the picturesque Sultan’s Pool amphitheatre in early July, another screening was kicking off just metres above the spectators’ heads.

    • The Edge suspension triggers fears of media clampdown

      Putrajaya’s three-month ban on two local publications reveals a growing clampdown on press freedom in Malaysia and a bid to encourage self-censorship, human rights groups said today.

    • 14,000 sign petition against FPB online regulations

      “If the Film and Publication Board’s new internet regulations are implemented, they’d have the right to review and classify almost every blog, video, and personal website – even Avaaz campaigns like this one. Think apartheid-era censorship, reloaded and super-charged for an all-out assault on our digital freedoms.”

    • WeChat censorship report: 1.5% of posts get censored

      WeChat is China’s hottest social media app. But like internet services in China, discussion on WeChat isn’t entirely free – it is censored by Tencent in accordance with Chinese law. Just how censored is WeChat, and what exactly is being hidden from view? Those questions are the subject of an exhaustive new report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on WeChat censorship.

    • How Tight Is Internet Censorship In China? It Censors WeChat Even For Harmless Rumors

      The Citizen Lab report, published on Monday July 20, conducted an analysis over several thousand posts that were posted publically on the social messaging app WeChat’s public blog. WeChat is owned by Tencent.

    • Dear Instagram, I love you but you’re bringing me down
    • Robyn Lawley exposes Instagram’s censorship policy in a weekend Twitter rant
    • Bill raises online censorship fears

      Legislation that is being promoted as a way to update the country’s anti-discrimination rules has sparked controversy in the Lower House and society at large amid concerns that it could lead to censorship, particularly in online forums.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Are Arabs white?

      In the US, race has always mattered. Whiteness in particular has mattered most, standing as the seal of civilisation and the gateway towards citizenship.

      Since 1944, Arabs have been deemed white by law. Many Arabs still embrace and defend that status today.

    • Palace fury over Hitler salute images is guff

      “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”. Anyone who heard that in childhood as a wise saying, not to be questioned, was being told their elders believed the Nazis were not all bad.

    • British archives hiding royal family’s links to anti-Semitism in 1930s, says historian

      While research hitherto has focused on the support German aristocrats secretly provided Hitler within Germany, Urbach’s book discusses an additional, international dimension to this secret diplomatic back channel, most notably from members of the British royal family.

    • The Queen’s Nazi salute: Historical revisionism in the service of state censorship

      Writing in the Telegraph, Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson thundered that it “makes my blood boil to think that anyone should use this image in any way to impugn the extraordinary record of service of Her Majesty to this country.”

      She was “a tiny child, and she is making that parodic salute long before her family could possibly have grasped what Hitler and Hitlerism was really all about.”

      In the Guardian, columnist Michael White wrote that the “Queen’s Nazi salute [was] a sign of ignorance shared by many in scary times.” The royal family’s “wobbly views” were, he claimed, shared by the “great British public.”

      Elsewhere, military historian James Holland opined, “I don’t think there was a child in Britain in the 1930s or 40s who has not performed a mock Nazi salute as a bit of a lark. It just shows the Royal Family are as human as the next man.”

    • It’s true, teens can’t be punished like adults

      In the past decade, advances in neuroscience have given new insights into old problems, ranging from drug addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder to adolescent shenanigans.

      For example, if the new neuroscience shows that a drug addict’s brain is physically dissimilar to a non-addict’s brain in ways that make the former more prone to addiction, then we must ask if his infractions of the law ought to be treated less punitively.

    • Race should not be unthinkingly trotted out to gag free speech
    • Traumatized Amos Yee is open for Donation

      16-year-old traumatized, Amos Yee is open for cash donation, who had already served four weeks in jail.

    • We welcome criticism within constraints, says Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong

      Mr Lee was asked about the cases of Amos Yee and Roy Ngerng – the former found guilty of insulting a religion, the latter of defaming the Prime Minister – in an interview with Time.

    • AWARE statement on the prosecution of Amos Yee

      AWARE has grave concerns about the negative implications of the recent prosecution of Amos Yee. This statement focuses on harassment and hate speech as these areas are closest to our work, although we also share concerns that others have raised about the importance of upholding freedom of expression, children’s rights, and the integrity of people with autism and mental health issues.

    • Teen blogger Amos Yee files appeal
    • Amos Yee files appeal against conviction and sentence
    • Singaporean blogger Amos Yee appeals against conviction, sentence

      Teenage blogger Amos Yee, who received a four-week jail sentence for posting an obscene image online and posting content intended to hurt the religious feelings of Christians, is appealing against both his conviction and the sentence.

    • Lawyers want judge who’s not Christian for Amos Yee appeal

      The lawyers for teenage blogger Amos Yee want his appeal to be heard by a non-Christian judge when it goes before the High Court.

      The 16-year-old will be appealing against both his conviction and sentence. His lawyer Alfred Dodwell filed the notice of appeal on July 9, three days after Yee was released from remand.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Corporate lobbying expense jumps as U.S. trade debate rages

      Washington lobbying by companies and groups involved in global trade boomed in the past nine months, records show, as Congress debated a landmark trade pact proposed by President Barack Obama, the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

      Lobbying expenditures by members of a pro-TPP coalition increased to $135 million in the second quarter of 2015, up from $126 million in the first quarter and $118 million in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to Senate Office of Public Records reports reviewed by Reuters.

    • Trademarks

      • JDate Is Suing JSwipe Over The Letter ‘J’, Here’s What My Bubbie Would Have Said

        Today, Forbes unearthed a lawsuit from late last year that Jewish dating site JDate’s parent company filed against an app called JSwipe (also aimed at Jewish folk). It’s over the use of the letter J. The case is set to pick up again next month.

      • Jdate Sues Competitor Jewish Dating App For Using The Letter “J”

        Jdate, the popular dating service responsible for more Jewish hookups than a bottle of Manischewitz, is playing hardball in the dog-eat-dog world of nice Jewish match-making.

        Jdate’s parent company, Spark Networks, discreetly filed a lawsuit late last year against Jswipe, the ‘Tinder for Jews’ dating app, claiming intellectual property over the letter “J” within the Jewish dating scene (the company refers to the branding as the “J-family”).

      • Members Of The ‘Tribe’ Swipe For A Shidduch

        Over the sounds of the packed crowd at the lower level of Noho hotspot “Acme,” on Tuesday evening, one phrase could consistently be heard: “I work in real estate.”

      • Jdate Sues Competitor Jewish Dating App For Using The Letter “J”

        Additionally, Jdate claims it owns the patent on software that “confidentially determines matches and notifies users of mutual matches in feelings and interests.” Jswipe, like Tinder, notifies users when their romantic interest ‘swipes right’ on their picture, violating Jdate’s patent.

    • Copyrights

      • A 1990s anti-piracy law is why you haven’t seen the hacked list of Ashley Madison customers

        “Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), our team has now successfully removed all posts related to this incident as well as all Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about our users published online,” said Ashley Madison parent company Avid Life Media in a statement. “We have always had the confidentiality of our customers’ information foremost in our minds and are pleased that the provisions included in the DMCA have been effective in addressing this matter.”

      • Response to IPO consultation on raising jail sentences for online infringement

        The Intellectual Property Office is consulting on proposals to increase prison penalties for criminal online copyright infringement to 10 years to bring them to the same levels as those for similar physical copyright infringement.

07.24.15

Links 24/7/2015: openSUSE Leap 42.1, Intel With Rackspace for OpenStack

Posted in News Roundup at 3:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

Links 24/7/2015: GNOME 3.17.4, Mozilla Developer Network Turns 10

Posted in News Roundup at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Software Commons

    In this sense, software commons make sense, and because these commons do not effectively exist in some village somewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages, but much rather all over the Internet, they are of primary importance for software and for the world we live in.

  • The real reason Facebook does open source

    On the third day of OSCON, I heard Facebook’s James Pearce deliver one of the convention’s many keynote presentations.

    Pearce explained how Facebook does open source at scale. And according to him, Facebook launches several open source projects every month and has hundreds of engineers supporting those projects on an ongoing basis—all while they’re engaging with communities around the world to make software experiences better.

    But more interesting than how Facebook does this is the question of why they use, support, and release open source projects at a

  • IBM moves open-source business software to the cloud

    IBM has set up a new code repository that aims to foster collaborative development of enterprise open source software — and it may also drum up interest in its own Bluemix platform services.

  • 10 open source storage solutions that might be perfect for your company

    The right storage solution is critical for business, but the price tag can put many options out of reach. Luckily, there’s a host of powerful, scalable open source candidates to choose from.

  • The battle between open-source and proprietary software for drone development

    However, open-source software and hardware has become the platform of choice for developers for next-generation drone technology. Mature alternatives exist in the open-source realm. From OpenPilot to Dronecode, these projects emphasize customizability and offer ways to collaborate on development and support that are not possible with proprietary systems. For every layer of the drone, from flight code to firmware, to vision processing and collision avoidance, there are viable open-source options.

  • Creating The Open-Source Community Of Your Dreams

    When a company decides to embrace open-source software development, releasing the code under a suitable license is only the tip of the iceberg. The real challenge that companies face is learning how to attract and collaborate with contributors.

  • Monoid Is an Open Source Font That’s Perfect for Coders

    Monoid, designed by Andreas Larsen, is designed to be sleek and precise. Every single character in Monoid’s library has been designed by Larsen to be beyond easy to tell apart, so you don’t ever have to worry about confusing thetas, o’s, O’s, and 0’s (zeros). The font is also monospaced (each character takes up the same width), so it makes it easy to skim your code and spot any errors that might be fudging things up. The spacing between the characters is small, however, so you can fit as much as you need into a line of code. What makes Monoid even better is the fact that it’s alive. Since it’s an open source font, it can be adjusted and perfected over time by the very people that use it. You can check out Monoid at the link below.

  • A non-coder CAN contribute to open source

    Non programmers can write docs. They can design logos. They can help with user interface design. They can test fixes or new features. They can triage bugs by verifying that the submitted report can be recreated and adding additional details, logs, or config files. Larger projects need some infrastructure support that is more administration and security compliance than Java programmer. Many people who consider themselves non-programmers do have some pretty good scripting skills and can assist with packaging for distributions.

  • The Open Source Initiative Announces Linux Professional Institute Affiliate Membership

    Leading vendor-independent Linux certification organization extends commitment to furthering the adoption of Linux and Open Source.

  • Events

    • OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom

      At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

    • OSCON: From the Expo Floor

      Like many of the Linux/FOSS events that dot the calendar year, OSCON resembles that — Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year) — but along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.

    • OSCON Report: Big Blue Goes Big for FOSS

      “Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.

    • Open Container Project Gets New Name, Sees Member Growth

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • MDN celebrates 10 years of documenting YOUR Web

        Today, Mozilla proudly celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Mozilla Developer Network, one of the richest and also one of the few multilingual resources on the Web for documentation. It started in February 2005, when a small team dedicated to the open Web took DevEdge (Netscape’s developer materials) and set out to create an open, free, community-built online resource for all Web developers. Just a couple of months later, on 23 July, 2005 the original MDN wiki site launched and has evolved steadily ever since for the convenience and the benefit of its users.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Founder of GNU bestows blessing upon open source crowdfunding site

      Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project known by many in the open source worlds as rms, is not the sort of person you’d expect to endorse a product. But Stallman and the FSF have formed a partnership of sorts with Crowd Supply, a crowdfunding company that has been largely focused on open source hardware and software projects.

  • Project Releases

    • Linux: man-pages-4.01 is released

      I’ve released man-pages-4.01. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.

      This release resulted from patches, bug reports,and comments from nearly 50 contributors. As well as a large number of minor fixes to over 100 man pages, the more significant changes in man-pages-4.01 include the following.

  • Public Services/Government

    • France publishes free software procurement templates

      The French government has published templates to be used by procurement officers when requesting free software-based ICT solutions. The templates include intellectual property clauses, and clarify the specifics of the free software environment.

  • Licensing

    • QEMU is Conservancy’s Newest Member Project

      Today, Software Freedom Conservancy proudly welcomes QEMU, the generic machine emulator and virtualizer, as a member project. QEMU is now one of many free and open source software projects who call Conservancy their non-profit corporate home.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The missing discovery: CSIR’s open source drug development making waves everywhere except India

      It is an idea that has not set the country on fire, but has been noticed all over the world. For a few years now, it has been knocking at the doors of international technology awards, but losing out in the end to far more extraordinary innovations. It has also been among the few, if not the only, ideas from India to get an entire session at an American Chemical Society meeting. It is called the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) model. With a bit of luck and commitment, it could break new ground in drug discovery and development.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The French want to BAN .doc and .xls files from Le Gouvernement

      Microsoft could get the boot from the French government if a new recommendation from an official advisor is adopted.

      DISIC (Direction interministérielle des systèmes d’information et de communication de l’État) has recommended that French authorities ditch Microsoft Office tools in favour of the Open Document Format (ODF).

      DISIC is responsible for harmonising and reducing the costs of all state computers, including government ministries, state and regional departments and local authorities, and sees ODF as the best way to make them all interoperable.

      According to sources, an initial draft of the report envisaged outlawing Microsoft’s Open XML altogether, although with some agencies using tools specifically developed for use with Open XML, DISIC relented.

Leftovers

  • President Obama says the European Union is stronger with the United Kingdom

    Barack Obama has urged the United Kingdom to stay with the European Union.

    The US President also said that the UK is his nation’s “best partner” during an interview with the BBC on Thursday.

    “Having the United Kingdom in the European Union gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union,” he said during an interview with the broadcaster before his visit to Kenya.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • “Funding Terror”: Fox News Baselessly Fearmongers About Seattle’s Home Loans For Muslims

      Co-host Steve Doocy later worried that the loans amounted to “discrimination” in favor of Muslims, while network analyst Peter Johnson, Jr, said that it “opens up a lot of questions” such as concerns about “legitimatizing a law that is really inimical to American values.”

    • Fox Cites Misleading Anecdotes About Workers On Welfare To Attack Minimum Wage Increases

      A Fox News report on the so-called “unintended consequences” of Seattle, Washington’s municipal minimum wage increase included the unsubstantiated claim that better pay is encouraging workers to work less so that they stay in poverty and continue receiving government benefits. This report fits the network’s anti-minimum wage, poor-shaming narrative, but ignores the many benefits of increasing the minimum wage.

    • Comcast Really Wants Me To Stop Calling Their Top Lobbyist A ‘Top Lobbyist’

      Comcast executive David Cohen is, by dictionary definition, a lobbyist. And not just any lobbyist; a gushing profile piece by the Washington Post in 2012 called him a “wonk rock star” and the company’s “secret weapon,” who uses “his vast network of high-powered contacts” to help craft Comcast-friendly regulations and apply pressure on DC policy makers. You know, a lobbyist. Unless you’re Comcast, which has now e-mailed me repeatedly to demand I stop calling him that.

  • Privacy

    • Empower consumers to control their privacy in the Internet of Everything

      As an Eisenhower Fellow, Dr. David A. Bray had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan and Australia in a personal capacity to discuss the burgeoning privacy and security challenges that the Internet of Everything era presents. Throughout his meetings, everyone asked: who is responsible for ensuring security? Answering as an Eisenhower Fellow in a personal capacity, Bray was always quick to answer: Everyone is.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Transcript Of Sandra Bland’s Arrest Is As Revealing As The Video

      During the traffic stop that led to her arrest and, ultimately, her death in a Texas jail, Sandra Bland repeatedly questioned the decisions of state Trooper Brian Encinia and asserted rights she said Encinia was violating.

      A close look at the police car dashcam video that recorded the exchange shows her questions had merit: Encinia at every occasion escalates the tension. He tells Bland, a Black Lives Matter activist, she’s under arrest before she has even left her car, shouts at her for moving after ordering her to move, refuses to answer questions about why she’s being arrested and, out of the camera’s view, apparently slams her to the ground. He gets testy with her — “Are you done?” — when she explains after he points out she seems irritated. And, contrary to a recent Supreme Court decision, he unconstitutionally extends the traffic stop, it appears, out of spite.

    • Guantanamo Prisoner Balks at Working With Defense Lawyers

      A Guantanamo prisoner balked at working with his defense lawyers due to a possible conflict of interest Wednesday, prompting an indefinite recess in his pretrial hearing in Cuba.

      Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi told the military judge Wednesday he wished to stop conferring with the two lawyers assigned to his case, at least temporarily. During the recess, prosecutors will try to arrange a meeting between al-Hadi and one of his former attorneys in hopes of resolving the issue.

    • Blame the Police

      Sandra Bland’s arrest and death are a national scandal. The police are responsible.

    • The Eroding Character of the American People

      Attorney John W. Whitehead opens a recent posting (see below) on his Rutherford Institute website with these words from a song by Bob Dylan. Why don’t all of us feel ashamed? Why only Bob Dylan?

      I wonder how many of Bob Dylan’s fans understand what he is telling them. American justice has nothing to do with innocence or guilt. It only has to do with the prosecutor’s conviction rate, which builds his political career. Considering the gullibility of the American people, American jurors are the last people to whom an innocent defendant should trust his fate. The jury will betray the innocent almost every time.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Is Amazon Liable For IP Violations By Its Marketplace Vendors?

      Animal-shaped pillows are cute and fluffy, except when they spur litigation. Recently, the Milo & Gabby brand sued Amazon for IP infringement because merchants allegedly sold knockoffs of its “Cozy Companion Pillowcases.” Amazon has successfully avoided IP liability for its marketplace, and a recent ruling rejected most of Milo & Gabby’s claims. However, a key piece of Milo & Gabby’s claim survived Amazon’s dismissal attempt, leaving the possibility that Amazon could be liable for merchants’ IP violations.

    • Copyrights

      • EU Starts Geo-Blocking Antitrust Case Against U.S Movie Studios

        The European Union has today launched an antitrust investigation against several large U.S. movie studios and Sky UK. The European Commission wants to abolish geographical restrictions and has sent a statement of objections over the geo-blocking practices of six major US film studios including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.

      • Movie studios keep asking Google to remove pirated content on their own computers

        Google search results sometimes include a tiny message at the bottom that some sites have been removed for sharing pirated content.

        Those requests come from movie studios and other content rights holders who manually submit links to be taken down.

        What’s pretty hilarious is movie studios have been submitting takedown requests that include links to pirated content stored on their own desktop computers.

07.23.15

Microsoft Has Run Out of Attempts and Vista 10 Will Definitely Fail

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The ‘free’ upgrade trick won’t fix Microsoft’s bottom line

The finishing line

Summary: As Microsoft admits billions of dollars in losses just days before Vista 10 is pushed as a ‘free’ upgrade, there is no concrete sign that financial recovery is imminent, for the bigger cash cow (Office) suffers a similar fate

MICROSOFT thinks that the world is stupid and that given enough media propaganda the world will eventually believe that Microsoft is doing just fine. Microsoft is not doing fine (just ask anyone who works at Microsoft, except in the PR department).

“Vista 10 is not free and it never will be. AstroTurfing and PR is all that is. ‘Free’ upgrade is just a substitution of binaries; it’s like system update that bears with it a new brand and new number.”Microsoft is now suffering billions in losses and is therefore trying to abduct the competition. After Microsoft killed the Finnish giant Nokia the abusive company from Redmond is trying to deflect every bad news to Nokia. It grossly rewrites the recent history of Nokia and uses the corruptible elements in the press to bamboozle the public (as well as some journalists) into the belief that it’s all just a “Nokia” issue. A lot of the corporate media (even financial press) spoke about the layoffs as a “Nokia” thing [1, 2, 3], even though it clearly isn’t the case. It is Microsoft that’s dying, not Nokia, which still gets broken to pieces [1, 2], including patents that are passed to Android-hostile entities like patent trolls, at Microsoft’s directions. Microsoft just desperately tried to cling onto Nokia (especially the internationally-respected brand), trying in vain to rescue Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone, or KIN, or whatever they rename to). Microsoft already killed other companies, Danger for example (the company of Android's founder), by doing this same destructive routine. Mobile Linux is something that Microsoft cannot keep up with, no matter the number of coups and acquisitions. Watch the CBS-run CNET painting all these issues as mobile-only issues. Nonsense! Vista 10 will soon be officially released (there is media spam already, as we foresaw) by what’s essentially a dying company and as one writer put it, “Microsoft Takes a Hit Before Windows 10 Launch”. His summary: “A quarter of layoffs, write-downs, and exec shuffles in a huge loss ahead of the Windows 10 launch.”

AdWeek, essentially a PR rag, has just published an article titled “Microsoft Tries to Give Away Its Operating System”. It must be Ads Week, not AdWeek, because this headline is a lie. Vista 10 is not free and it never will be. AstroTurfing and PR is all that is. ‘Free’ upgrade is just a substitution of binaries; it’s like system update that bears with it a new brand and new number.

“Little By Little,” says Pogdon, “The World Is Freeing Itself From Microsoft”. Even patent extortion against Android/Linux is not enough to keep Microsoft going:

I’d guess this means the Android/Linux cash-cow has dried a little. Oh, and they wrote off Nokia…

It’s a big problem not just for Windows, one among two big cash cows, whose cost is reduced (not long-term cost) so as to remain competitive. “The more consumers that Microsoft puts on its Office 365 subscription rolls, the less it makes from each customer, data the company disclosed Tuesday showed.” That’s according to a Microsoft sceptic from IDG (one of the very few on that network). iophk noted that this article is “[m]issing a mention of LibreOffice or even the OpenDocument Format.” Nevertheless, it does show that the biggest cash cow too is in trouble, in part because it faces pricing pressure from competition like Google Apps and standards like ODF. Microsoft is going down the same path as Novell right now, living off its legacy while it still lasts. █

GNU/Linux Circles Ought to Stop Promoting Visual Studio, Which is Neither Cross-Platform Nor Free Software

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Windows at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“In the future, Microsoft wants Windows to run everything, from PCs to phones to cars to appliances. This is a terrifying prospect. If it happens, I’d be far more afraid that machinery everywhere would grind to a halt, planes would fall out of the sky, and civilization would crumble as a result of crummy embedded Windows design than any Y2K problem.”

–Paul Somerson, PC Computing

Summary: Media carries on openwashing Visual Studio and perpetuating the illusion that it is not tied to Microsoft Windows

TECHRIGHTS has already responded to the Visual Studio openwash the other day (also mentioned this other openwashing effort), having already warned about it five years ago, earlier this year, and earlier this month. It’s not about .NET or Mono, it’s about Visual Studio, which is purely proprietary with no imminent opening of anything, not even Visual Studio Code, which some Linux sites foolishly promote [1,2] (there are better programs which are neither from Microsoft nor are proprietary).

IDG has done this promotion of proprietary Visual Studio for platforms other than Windows. It’s only towards the end that discrimination against non-Windows platforms is very evident:

The software also can easily hook into Microsoft’s software for managing team projects, Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Online, both of which provide the base for a speedy, devops-styled development environment.

Well, this is Windows software. There is no parity at all between platforms. Visual Studio is still a proprietary program for Microsoft Windows, don’t let Microsoft paint it as cross-platform, not without a challenge. Microsoft is still aggressively attacking GNU/Linux, it is not playing nice with it.

“Eradicating Windows and slapping Linux on your computer sure isn’t as easy as it used to be,” writes Chris Hoffman this week, alluding to ‘secure boot’ in UEFI. This is the type of abuse Microsoft promotes (and now escalates further by removing the “on”/”off switch from some UEFI implementations on future computers — those coming with Vista 10 bundled). As an important reminder, UEFI lockdown is getting even worse, demonstrating that Microsoft hates Linux. With more such headaches on the horizon, affecting anyone wishing to at least try or explore GNU/Linux (not very technical people), Microsoft clearly has lots of hidden hate for Linux. There’s no “love”, just opportunistic PR. Anyone who actually thinks that Visual Studio will “play nice” with GNU/Linux has clearly not been paying attention (or paid attention only to puff pieces). █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Ubuntu Make 0.9 Brings Support For The Arduino IDE And Enhancements For The Microsoft VSC
  2. Install and Run Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu Linux 15.04

Spinning Proprietary Software Dangers as Dangers of Free/Libre Software

Posted in Deception, FUD, GPL, Microsoft, Security at 10:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The “legally-binding” and “transparency” conundrums grossly distorted

Vintage marriage license

Summary: News sites mislead their readers, teaching them that the biggest dangers associated with proprietary software are in fact problems exclusive to Free/libre Open Source software

FOR Microsoft to ever pretend to care about security would basically mean to lie, blatantly. Microsoft works hand in glove with the NSA and it has, on numerous occasions, admitted that true security isn’t the goal. Its actions too show this repeatedly. Known flaws -- or holes, or bug doors, or whatever one frames them as -- are not being patched unless the public finds out about them.

In order to bolster security perceptions and to give an illusion that Microsoft actually cares about security and invests in security, the company has just hired some staff in Israel (acquisition is one other way to frame this). The media calls it “security provider”, but given Israel’s record on back doors, cracking (e.g. Stuxnet development), wiretapping etc. this is rather laughable. A lot of Microsoft’s so-called ‘security’ products are made in Israel, and some companies in this military-driven industry facilitate and cater for spies using back doors, usually under the guise of ‘security’ (they mean “national security”). We wrote about this in past years.

“This proves that security through obscurity is a myth that merely encourages people to rely on poorly implemented programs with shoddy security, whereupon developers choose to hide the ugliness of the code.”We were rather disturbed to see this bizarre article yesterday. Titled “Hackers targeting .NET shows the growing pains of open source security”, the article is a big lie. The headline is definitely a lie. .NET is PROPRIETARY (still), it has holes in it, and some fool tries to use it to call Free/libre software “not secure”. Let’s assume for a second that .NET code becoming visible to the world exposes many holes, indeed. It proves exactly the opposite of what the headline says then. If anything, it shows that Microsoft keeping the code secret assured low quality code and bred vulnerable code. Once shown to the world, these holes are being exploited. This proves that security through obscurity is a myth that merely encourages people to rely on poorly implemented programs with shoddy security, whereupon developers choose to hide the ugliness of the code. A lot of the claims from the article come from a FOSS foe, Trend Micro, but they can be framed correctly to state that, if anything, a public audit of .NET now shows just how terrible proprietary software can be, having never been subjected to outside scrutiny.

In other disturbing headlines we find another inversion of the truth. The Business Software Alliance (BSA), or the EULA police, has done a lot to show how dangerous proprietary software licences can be. Nevertheless, Slashdot with its pro-Microsoft slant as of late [1, 2] gives a platform to Christopher Allan Webber.

“Is this another false “I really like the GPL except” post,” asked us a reader. To quote the author: “The fastest way to develop software which locks down users for maximum monetary extraction is to use free software as a base” (oh, yes, those greedy Free software developers!)

The article has a misleading/provocative headline (hence we provide no direct link) and Bruce Perens, who had already accused Black Duck of FUD against the GPL (“I think it’s 100% B.S.,” he said three years ago), responded to the piece by stating:

I help GPL violators clean up their act, it’s my main business.

Every one has had a total lack of due diligence. I will come in and find that they have violated the licenses of 21 proprietary software companies (this is a real customer example) by integrating their code into their main product, just like the GPL code. Some of them only had an “evaluation” license, some not even that, some wildly violated the terms of any license they got.

Most of them are in silicon valley. They seem to have the attitude that they will clean up their legal problems when they’re rich, and nothing but getting their product out of the door matters until then.

They don’t ask me to feel sorry for them. I bill them a lot, and in the end, they’re clean and legal.

When it comes to legal risk and licensing, nothing beats proprietary software. It’s risky, it’s expensive (lock-in makes the exit barriers considerably higher), and it is very hard to obey or comply with, especially when you are low on staff and funds (must renew licences all the time). Contrariwise, it is very easy to comply with copyleft; there is no renewal work required and no renewal fees. All one is required to do is to maintain the copyleft of the code used. The rules are very simple. █

Links 23/7/2015: New RHEL Release, Capital One Releases Code

Posted in News Roundup at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Enjoy Your Romaine—While It Lasts

      The mighty Central Valley hogs the headlines, but California’s Salinas Valley is an agricultural behemoth, too. A rifle-shaped slice of land jutting between two mountain ranges just south of Monterey Bay off the state’s central coast, it’s home to farms that churn out nearly two-thirds of the salad greens and half of the broccoli grown in the United States. Its leafy-green dominance has earned it the nickname “the salad bowl of the world.” And while the Central Valley’s farm economy reels under the strain of drought—it’s expected to sustain close to $2.7 billion worth of drought-related losses—Salinas farms are operating on all cylinders, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

  • Finance

    • At Wall Street Journal, Government-Enforced Monopolies = ‘Free Market’

      Those folks at the Wall Street Journal are really turning reality on its head. Today it ran a column by Robert Ingram, a former CEO of Glaxo Wellcome, complaining about efforts to pass “transparency” legislation in Massachusetts, New York and a number of other states.

      This legislation would require drug companies to report their profits on certain expensive drugs, as well as government funding that contributed to their development.

      [...]

      This would eliminate all the distortions associated with patent monopolies, such as patent-protected prices that can be more than 100 times as much as the free-market price. This would eliminate all the ethical dilemmas about whether the government or private insurers should pay for expensive drugs like Sovaldi, since the drugs would be cheap. It would also eliminate the incentive to mislead doctors and the public about the safety and effectiveness of drugs in order to benefit from monopoly profits.

    • What do Angela Merkel and Mitt Romney have in common?

      In May 2012, when Mitt Romney was campaigning for president, he made a statement that summed up his economic views — and came to define his run for office:

      “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. These people “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them … I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

      Germany’s current leaders — and most of Europe’s, as well — seem to fully agree with this philosophy. They treat Greece exactly as though the country fit Romney’s description of that lazy, greedy 47 percent of Americans. And Greece’s experience prefigures what looms elsewhere: like Romney, many European leaders appeal to their publics to embrace that perspective, often effectively. This involves leading the hard-working 53 percent to rise up and refuse to pay taxes that sustain the lazy and irresponsible, recipients of public support and overindulged public employees who deliver it. Romney’s portrayal of the 47 percent matches, in words and tone, many European leaders’ portrayal of Greeks (and also Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Irish and the peoples of whatever other country happens to be in an economic rut.)

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 20-year-old SNP MP Mhairi Black isn’t happy about Tony Blair calling her party ‘cave men’

      Tony Blair’s criticism of the SNP for having a “cave man” ideology is ridiculous considering his “primitive” policy on Iraq, one of the Scottish nationalists’ rising stars has said.

      The former prime minister said on Wednesday morning that Scottish nationalism was “reactionary” and consisted of “blaming someone else” for Scotland’s problems.

    • ALEC Admits School Vouchers Are for Kids in Suburbia

      School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.

    • Donald Trump And Fox & Friends’ Symbiotic Relationship

      Fox & Friends has emerged as Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleader and defender in the media, a role the presidential candidate is rewarding with lavish public praise.

    • ‘Media Have Been Applying a False Narrative to the Entire Issue’ – CounterSpin interview with Gareth Porter on the Iran deal

      NBC’s David Gregory said the international community, divided on many things, are united on this: “They think Iran is up to no good and wants to build a nuclear weapon.”

      US corporate media have a habit when discussing Iran, though not only then, of presenting what are overwhelmingly US points of view as those of the whole world–a less-than-helpful quality as we try to understand the deal with Iran currently making headlines.

      Here to help us sort through it is investigative journalist Gareth Porter, author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and a regular contributor to Middle East Eye.

  • Censorship

    • New Facebook video controls let you be sexist, ageist or secretive

      Videos on Facebook are big business. As well as drugged up post-dentist footage, there is also huge advertising potential. Now Facebook has announced a new set of options for video publishers — including the ability to limit who is able to see videos based on their age and gender.

    • New Censorship Bill Passed in Australia

      Having lived in Australia this Kat tries to turn his attention to the Land Down Under as often as he can. Although the Australian intellectual property law regime takes a lot from its UK and common law counterparts, they have often been a step ahead (or to the side, depending on your perspective) in one way or another. Recently the Australian Parliament passed the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill 2015, which aims to give the Australian courts more tools to combat online copyright infringement, or the facilitation thereof. While the provision is not necessarily hugely pertinent to those of us working here in the UK, it is still an interesting one.

  • Privacy

    • Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Accuses David Cameron Of ‘Technological Incompetence’ over Encryption Bill

      The founder of Wikipedia accused David Cameron of “technological incompetence” on Tuesday, telling the British Prime Minister the idea of banning encryption was “just nonsense.”

      Speaking on HuffPost Live in New York, Jimmy Wales responded to a question about the British government’s push to gain access to encrypted sites for reasons of security.

      He called increased online security of “critical importance” in the face of “real threats from cyber crime.”

      “That means end-to-end encryption everywhere. That’s what he [Cameron] should be campaigning for,” Wales said.

      “The idea that you could ban encryption… it is just nonsense, it’s impossible, it’s math, you can’t ban math,” he added.

    • [on Washington Post]

      The Washington Post again demanded that tech companies create special ‘golden keys’ for authorities to keep and use for access to private communication. Protected by a warrant, of course. For the benefit of this discussion (which is really getting old), I just put together the reasons why it is a dumb idea.

    • Is the NSA lying about its failure to prevent 9/11?

      On March 20, 2000, as part of a trip to South Asia, U.S. President Bill Clinton was scheduled to land his helicopter in the desperately poor village of Joypura, Bangladesh, and speak to locals under a 150-year-old banyan tree. At the last minute, though, the visit was canceled; U.S. intelligence agencies had discovered an assassination plot. In a lengthy email, London-based members of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, a terrorist group established by Osama bin Laden, urged al Qaeda supporters to “Send Clinton Back in a Coffin” by firing a shoulder-launched missile at the president’s chopper.

    • UK Court rules DRIPA unlawful

      The successful judicial review was brought by Liberty, represented by David Davis MP and Tom Watson MP, with ORG and PI acting as intervenors.

    • How to Create a Burner Account on Ashley Madison (And Other Sketchy Sites)

      In brief, these masked cards are burner card numbers that are linked to your real credit card—but the third-party site will have no access to your personal information (though Abine will have all your data stored—so, just hope they don’t ever get hacked). A masked card lets you use any name you want (e.g. Joe Smith, Kevin Bacon, Barack Bush—go nuts), and for the billing address, you just use Abine’s address in Boston. The cost on your real credit card will just show up as “Abine” on your card statement.

    • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg moves step closer to becoming world’s richest person

  • Civil Rights

    • Woman recruited by Google four times and rejected, joins suit
    • “Between the World and Me”: Ta-Nehisi Coates Extended Interview on Being Black in America

      We spend the hour with Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “Between the World and Me,” an explosive new book about white supremacy and being black in America. The book begins, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” It is written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori, and is a combination of memoir, history and analysis. Its publication comes amidst the shooting of nine African-American churchgoers by an avowed white supremacist in Charleston; the horrifying death of Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman in Texas who was pulled over for not signaling a lane change; and the first anniversary of the police killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson. Coates talks about how he was influenced by freed political prisoner Marshall “Eddie” Conway and writer James Baldwin, and responds to critics of his book, including Cornel West and New York Times columnist David Brooks. Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues.

    • ‘I will light you up!’: Texas officer threatened Sandra Bland with Taser during traffic stop

      According to newly released police video, a Texas trooper threatened Sandra Bland with a Taser when he ordered her out of her vehicle during a traffic stop on July 10, three days before she was found dead in a county jail.

      Bland — a 28-year old African American woman — was stopped for failing to signal while changing lanes, but the routine traffic stop turned confrontational after the officer, Brian Encinia, ordered Bland to put out her cigarette.

    • In ‘White People,’ an Attempt to Break the Cycle of Ignorance

      It turns out, according to Vargas, that white students are eligible for 96 percent of scholarships and are more than 40 percent more likely to receive private scholarships. As Katy comes to terms with reality, she begins to see her frustrations for what they truly are: resentment about limited resources in the academic arena. The fact that these statistics were so readily available to Vargas also potentially points to Katy’s poor research abilities, which may be a factor in her inability to find scholarships. What is truly frightening—but not at all shocking—is the tendency for the white millennials in the film to place blame on minorities before engaging in critical research to substantiate their beliefs.

    • ‘Selma’ director Ava DuVernay says dashcam video of Sandra Bland arrest was doctored

      Ava DuVernay, who directed the Oscar-nominated civil rights movement film Selma, suggested on Tuesday that the dashboard camera footage of Sandra Bland’s arrest earlier this month was altered.

    • Bernie Sanders becomes the first candidate to speak out on Sandra Bland: “We need real police reform”
    • 1. Whisper to NYT 2. Demand Anonymity 3. Truth!

      Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept, 7/21/15) traces the transmission of a demonstrably false claim–that ISIS’s “top leaders now use couriers or encrypted channels that Western analysts cannot crack to communicate” as a result of “revelations from Edward J. Snowden”–from nameless “intelligence and military officials” to a front-page piece by the New York Times‘ Eric Schmitt and Ben Hubbard (7/20/15) to other journalists gleefully retweeting and reprinting the false claim as fact.

    • The Spirit of Judy Miller is Alive and Well at the NYT, and It Does Great Damage

      One of the very few Iraq War advocates to pay any price at all was former New York Times reporter Judy Miller, the classic scapegoat. But what was her defining sin? She granted anonymity to government officials and then uncritically laundered their dubious claims in the New York Times. As the paper’s own editors put it in their 2004 mea culpa about the role they played in selling the war: “We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.” As a result, its own handbook adopted in the wake of that historic journalistic debacle states that “anonymity is a last resort.”

    • “Your Border War Stuff Is Ridiculous”: Fox’s Stossel Demolishes O’Reilly’s Anti-Immigrant Stats from CIS

      Stossel: “You’re Citing Statistics From The Center For Immigration Studies … They Spin Them”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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