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07.06.14

Bill Gates Pushed Out of States by Better Informed Teachers

Posted in Bill Gates at 6:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Ravitch's book

Summary: Bill Gates’ private (for-profit) coup against public education is being impeded by people whom it negatively affects

SOME time ago it was reported in local media that Indiana had been getting out of the Bill Gates-imposed Common Core regime. Bill Gates apparently bribed not enough lawmakers, politicians, newspapers and non-profit origanisations over there. Passing taxpayers’ money to private pockets didn’t work as smoothly as expected.

According to new backlash against Gates, led by more public figures like Professor Diane Ravitch who wants Bill Gates investigated, it is “Good Riddance to Common Core Testing”, at least in some states:

Bill Gates’ money helped foist Common Core on Indiana

Indiana is no longer alone in abandoning the Common Core academic standards.

Oklahoma and South Carolina are pulling out, and North Carolina is headed for the door as well. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is taking his state out of the national standards, provoking a conflict with the state’s education superintendent and causing uncertainty about state testing in the fall.

Bill Gates is hardly any different from the Kochs. He has better marketing and he buys more media outlets than the Kochs, at the cost of around one million dollars per day. He does all this abusive lobbying while he keeps pretending to do charity (he hoards billions of additional dollars at times of recession), using heavy PR and bribed press. For people among world’s top 10 for wealth, the cost of bribing lots of papers and officials is by far outweighed by the profit this generates and Gates has been an incredibly useful example of this.

Here is a new and rather long article that covers some of the angles we have talked about before (although we may not agree with everything it says):

COMMON CORE WILL MAKE BILL GATES RICHER

[...]

Common Core will be used for “data mining.” In May 2012 Charles Scaliger wrote in The New American that “in the sagebrush desert of Bluffdale, Utah, in the shadow of the Wasatch mountains, a vast new federal surveillance and intelligence processing center is being erected. The so-called Utah Data Center, operated by the National Security Agency, will occupy more than a million square feet when it becomes operational sometimes next year.

Coincidentally this Data Center was completed in 2013 about the same time Common Core was being promoted by such organizations as the National Governors Association (which helps state governments get federal grants) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (which claims to provide leadership, advocacy and technical assistance on major educational issues) – started work on a common set of curriculum standards in English language arts and mathematics while using such deceitful words as “state led” and “voluntary.”

Thankfully, a lot of people now realise that not only in the education sector is Gates doing great harm. Former managers from Microsoft link to our articles about Gates, perhaps realising what was inconvenient to believe when Microsoft paid their salary. █

Microsoft Struggling to Make Sales and More Future Products Axed

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 8, Windows at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Lack of demand

End of season

Summary: The software bully which manipulates its financial reports is said to be unable to sell the latest Windows and a new Microsoft product running this version of Windows is axed before arrival

Microsoft’s criminal behaviour does not work quite so well in hardware, where bribes are harder to get budget for (unlike with software, which can be copied infinitely). Microsoft was already forced to kill many products and divisions and it has many famous failures in hardware, including Kin, Windows Mobile, and Xbox (which lost money). Now we learn that Microsoft has ditched yet another product. This article uses promotional language which fails to explain what a colossal failure Surface has been (the big table as well as the tablets with the same brand name).

Based on other reports like this one from ZDNet (citing the Microsoft-funded Net Applications), right after China banned Vista 8 and various countries/businesses rejected it for technical reasons:

Net Applications has found that Windows 8.x actually lost user share in June 2014, while Windows 7 has really been the operating system to gain from XP’s end of support.

This is not good for Microsoft’s financial bottom line. It’s also embarrassing because it shows systematic pushback.

Another ZDNet report says that Microsoft enables XP to still receive patches (a month ago IDG reported inaction from XP users). The NSA is going to benefit from this as more PCs have lots of back doors piling up. The NSA flags GNU/Linux users (or people who read GNU/Linux sites) for extra surveillance, based on leaked source code. Those who want security (e.g. Russia, China, Korea) will surely move to GNU/Linux very soon. █

Internet of Things Alliance Now Has a Mole, Microsoft

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Squirrel

Summary: The Internet of Things Alliance has just let the mole, Microsoft, dip its finger in the competition, as it so often does in order to derail the competition

The poorly-named “AllSeen Alliance” (or Internet of Things Alliance) is about to find out that it doesn’t pay off to welcome Microsoft. Resistance and antagonism are defence mechanisms here.

OpenStack learned that Microsoft involvement is trouble, as it had ushered in a proprietary culture (secrecy, neglect, technical incompatibilities, and distrust-inducing NSA back doors). The same goes for OpenDaylight, which is another way Microsoft got its foot inside the Linux Foundation (directly, not through Nokia or Novell).

While there is propaganda from Microsoft-bribed circles (e.g. Om Malik, who received Microsoft money and apparently still receives money from Microsoft to publicly openwash them as well as whitewash Nadella) it is clear that Microsoft is not an Open Source friend but a foe. Microsoft is doing so much to harm FOSS, as we shall continue to show perhaps for years to come (if Microsoft is still around).

IDG said that “Microsoft backs open source for the Internet of Things” (widely cited article), but it’s not clear what the word “backs” should be taken as. Microsoft competes with FOSS and Linux in this area, so Microsoft probably “backs” the Internet of Things in the same way that Microsoft “backs” ODF or the NSA “backs” Germany (see related news which fall outside the scope of this one particular post).

Having proprietary software inside a supposedly open initiative, just like in OpenDaylight, is a very dumb idea. In past years we covered examples where Microsoft was revealed to have pressured groups (rival groups) to let them in. Some successfully resisted and some admittedly perished after they had caved in for Microsoft’s manipulative mind game (e.g. complaining about exclusion and intolerance).

“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is what one of our readers immediately called the above news. One pro-GNU/Linux pundit stated: “Microsoft, like most companies, does what it is in its own interests, and I think joining the AllSeen Alliance is truly a marriage of convenience. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t interpret this move by Microsoft as marking some new attitude toward open source. It seems to be something that is clearly rooted in Microsoft’s self-interest rather than any shared open source vision.”

The Linux Foundation has once again let a malicious mole in. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before there are complaints from within. It always happens sooner or later.

The more moles the Linux Foundation brings in (Microsoft or its allies), the harder it will become for it to prevent entryism. Just look what happened to Nokia. █

Links 6/7/2014: Korea’s Domestic GNU/Linux Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 2:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • CMS

    • How Card.com Is Securing Itself and Its Users With Open Source

      “We’re heavily involved in Drupal. I’m a member of the Drupal security team and the former lead of the team for over two years,” Knaddison said. “So it’s an area where we have a fair amount of expertise and depth, and we feel that our situation is best served by fixing vulnerabilities directly in the software itself.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source to help Wales protect environment

      Using open source software solutions is helping a Welsh pilot project to manage flood risks and provide a stepping stone for future research. The Citizen Observatory Web (Cobweb) project involves citizens using their smartphone or tablets, to submit data observations within the Dyfi area in Wales, to help collect environmental data for use in evidence based policy.

    • S Korea to break away from Windows by 2020

      South Korea said that it will move away from Windows in the future to avoid dependency on the Microsoft operating system, citing the fact that Windows XP is no longer supported.

    • Korean govt to turn its back on Microsoft… and use what instead, Hangul?

      Usage of idiosyncratic software could push the Korean government away from Microsoft’s offerings and into open-source OSes like Linux

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • INTERVIEW: DAMIAN CONWAY

      Damian Conway is one of the Guardians of Perl (our term) and one of Perl 6′s chief architects. But he’s chiefly a computer scientist, a brilliant communicator and an educator. His presentations are often worth crossing continents for. He was the Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Melbourne’s Monash University between 2001 and 2010, and has run courses on everything from Regular Expressions for Bioinformatics to Presentation Aikido (and of course, lots of Perl). Which is why, when we discovered he was making a keynote at this year’s QCon conference in London in March, we braved train delays and the sardine travelling classes of the London Underground to meet him opposite Westminster Abbey.

Leftovers

07.05.14

Microsoft Sabotaging No-IP Rather Than Admitting Its Own Failures, Time for Class Action Seems Right as List of Affected Domains Collected

Posted in Microsoft at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft control over the Internet (control that should never have been granted) is used to shut down millions of legitimate services

THIS is an incident that has infuriated many people, companies, organisations, etc. It’s widely publicised by now. Microsoft is above the law, apparently, or rather, Microsoft is the law in the United States (see our page about “Microsoft influence in the United States government”).

Tux Machines, our near-real-time news site, relied on No-IP until some months ago. Millions of people use the site every month. Millions of services and sites use No-IP every month. It means that billions of people are dependent on No-IP . It is a critical service for perhaps tens of millions of Web sites and other services (such as LDAP, E-mail, and so on). Well, Microsoft’s outrageous demands have ruined the services. It is Microsoft’s fault (due to its own sabotage like back doors and incompetence that makes many insecurities). Do Microsoft’s demands now supersede the rest of us? Can Microsoft knock offline millions of services all around the world and if so, where did Microsoft acquire such an infitinite power? Here is an explanation and roundup of the past few days’ responses, which resulted in Microsoft relinquishing control of No-IP (when it was already too late and huge damage had been done).

“Can Microsoft knock offline millions of services all around the world and if so, where did Microsoft acquire such an infitinite power?”Let’s start by stating that Microsoft has back doors and much of the blame for SPAM, DDOS etc. should be put on Microsoft Windows, which is insecure by design. Microsoft cannot claim to be pursuing better Internet security (ever!) while it does what it does for the NSA. For Microsoft to take a whole network to court is like the FBI and USDOJ going after MegaUpload; however, Microsoft, unlike the FBI and USDOJ, is not a Federal agency. So what the heck is going on here? And how can Microsoft get away with it? Surely there should be a class action lawsuit, but will victims be capable of finding each other, then organising? Here is the response from No-IP and an article about it which says:

Millions of legitimate servers that rely on dynamic domain name services from No-IP.com suffered outages on Monday after Microsoft seized 22 domain names it said were being abused in malware-related crimes against Windows users.

“Apparently,” it says, “the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from our customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt” (Microsoft is probably arrogant enough to not even apologise).

“Microsoft now claims that it just wants to get us to clean up our act, but its draconian actions have affected millions of innocent Internet users,” says the above.

They should organise for class action lawsuit. Perhaps No-IP should sue Microsoft for loss of many customers and the customers too should sue Microsoft for the damage caused by its overreach and abuse. No-IP ought to help its clients organise for a class action lawsuit.

Two days ago I drafted a post about this, calling for class action against Microsoft over this whole overreach. I did not publish it at the time as I was waiting to see how much damage was done overall. The services had not been restored by that time. Some services were down for several days. Now, let’s try to estimate the damage. If we assume $1000 compensation for 1.8 milion servers, then that’s $1.8 billion, which Microsoft can probably borrow from one of its offshore havens to pay in reparations. Microsoft should be sued in an organised fashion and prepare to pay billions of dollars in compensation, just as they were forced to pay fines after browser-related crimes.

“So, to go after 2,000 or so bad sites, [Microsoft] has taken down four million,” Gogun said. Gogun is a senior employee at NoIP.

Here is some press coverage of interest and feedback from victims, including:

  • “The dynamic DNS free domains from NoIp are working again. Thank @mictosoft for suspending 4mil honest users due to a “technical error”.” (Source)
  • “No-Ip.com categorically claims microsoft did not talk or consult with them before hijacking their networks! Disrupted millions!” (Source)
  • “Good to see that in the “land of the free” the bully with the money can take down the small guy” (Source)
  • “Dear Microsoft, please stop breaking the domains relied on by everyone who doesn’t have a static IP – surely compensation due? #noip” (Source)

How can Microsoft gain the power to just shut down parts of the Web without an open legal process? Watch IDG’s (partly Microsoft-funded) coverage of the No-IP fiasco (tilted in favour of Microsoft to make it look like innocent “error”).

Tux Machines, which used to be No-IP-managed, went down around the same time that I repeatedly protested about this online. Interestingly enough (and that’s a fact), DDOS attacks on Tux Machines (by Windows-running PCs) began just a few minutes after I repeatedly ranted about Microsoft’s sabotage of No-IP. I can’t prove the correlation, but it was curious enough to note. The botmaster/s attacking Tux Machines was not stupid. There was hammering on different parts of the site each time one was blocked/denied (I had to manually block huge chunks of IPs and addresses). Following Microsoft’s logic, many of its back-doored (for NSA) Windows PCs attack Web sites, so it’s fine to just shut down Windows PCs universally.

Here is some other and later coverage of developments and an official response from Microsoft (face-saving lies). 1.8 million customers are said to be affected and “Microsoft Insists That No-IP ‘Outage’ Was Due To A ‘Technical Error’ Rather Than Gross Abuse Of Legal Process,” says TechDirt:

Microsoft Insists That No-IP ‘Outage’ Was Due To A ‘Technical Error’ Rather Than Gross Abuse Of Legal Process

Earlier today, we wrote about a ridiculous situation in which Microsoft was able to convince a judge to let it seize a bunch of popular domains from No-IP.com, the popular dynamic DNS provider, routing all their traffic through Microsoft servers, which were unable to handle the load, taking down a whole bunch of websites. Microsoft claimed that this was all part of a process of going after a few malware providers, though No-IP points out that Microsoft could have easily contacted them and the company’s fraud and abuse team would have cut off those malware providers.

To quote the conclusion: “That’s not a “technical error.” That’s Microsoft blatantly making an extreme claim that convinced a judge to hand over a whole bunch of domain names without any kind of due process or adversarial hearing. While Microsoft may have then had a technical error on top of that, what kicked this off was a very, very big legal error.”

Microsoft probably knows that it’s about to be sued, so it is making up stories about “errors” while Microsoft-funded press repeats the lies. Here is AOL coverage:

Microsoft seized 23 domains this week from No-IP, a provider of dynamic DNS services, after filing a civil suit alleging that the domains in question were used to distribute malware.

The domains, according to Microsoft, were used 93 percent of the time for distributing the Bladabindi and Jenxcus malware families. A court granted Microsoft custodianship — DNS authority — of the digital properties so that it could “identify and route all known bad traffic to the Microsoft sinkhole and classify the identified threats.”

This was an abuse of the Court. Microsoft deceived the Court to take over what one writer called “universe” (millions of domains). Microsoft broke the Internet for several days, having abused or bamboozled a court.

To quote one of our readers, Microsoft “is getting the heat for the attack against No-IP. Yes, they failed by trying to run Microsoft products in a production situation but the actual anger needs to be directed at the court which handed, ex parte, No-IP’s business over to Microsoft. How on earth was that allowed? That’s the real question and one that Microsoft appears to what to distract from with stupid side tracks on ‘technical issues’ to bring the attention away from legal issues. Fraud. There was no accidents involved: Microsoft took over the domain on purpose after a lot of work manipulating the court.

“Then underneath the technical side is Microsoft inherent, built-in vulnerability. Without Microsoft there would be no botnets.” █

Bill Gates Deeply Corrupt Not Just in Education Sector

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Knight

Summary: Bursting the bubble or shattering the illusion that Gates is merely a misguided well-meaning person when it comes to education ‘reform’

THE Gates Foundation continues to swindle the world.

GMO (e.g. Monsanto) monopoly is still on the agenda based on reports from CNET (part of CBS) and other CBS sites that highlight more patents on bananas, with investments from Bill Gates. They are of course pretending it’s about feeding hungry Africans, which is a common PR strategy, but it is really about profit. A lot of Gates-bribed media companies and blogs (bribed for silencing Gates criticism, plus the occasional grooming) might be able to keep the lies going some of the time (watch the Gates-funded Guardian publishing a disgraceful puff piece and other whitewash from the plutocrats’ fan press, Forbes), but they can’t keep the world from knowing that’s rather obvious to more and more people over time.

Well, “for a modest profit,” note reports, Bill Gates has just sold shares in private thugs. So only after public pressure and some profit Bill Gates distances self from G4S [1, 2, 3, 4]. It’s a shame that this did not receive even more media attention. It highlights the way Gates continues to rapidly increase his wealth while pretending to be giving it all away. It should be easy to see that he does this everywhere, essentially bribing to profit where it’s more challenging a task. He would bribe officials who stand in the way of his corporate ambitions. A common mistake to be made is assuming that Bill Gates ‘screwed up’ only with education when the reality of the matter is that he’s hardly any different from the Koch brothers, he just has better PR.

Here is some recent coverage about Gates’ “Common Core” crusade (privatising what’s public, for a profit). This coverage comes from a paper (Washington Post) whose board used to include Bill's wife Melinda and his close friend Warren Buffett. It says:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

[...]

The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.

Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.

The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.

We recently covered Ravitch's views, which the same paper gave a platform to, despite the infamous Gates ties.

Here we have a Gates-funded newspaper covering a “Rush-hour protest by teachers to target the Gates Foundation” and another Microsoft-linked (and at times — in a previous incarnation — Gates-funded) folks covering this protest against Bill Gates (some GeekWire staff came from Microsoft-funded circles). To quote:

Bill Gates has poured millions of dollars into public education reform in the U.S., and some teachers aren’t too thrilled about that.

About 150 instructors from the Badass Teacher Association marched through downtown Seattle toward the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday evening to demonstrate their disdain for the Common Core standards that have been implemented in 45 states, thanks largely to support from the Gates Foundation.

[...]

But as detailed in this Washington Post article from earlier this month, there’s been more and more pushback recently from both teachers and politicians on the standards. Some accuse Gates for supporting Common Core not for the benefit of students, but rather for corporate interest and to help Microsoft’s bottom line because the standards support technology and data.

The most important point we wish to highlight is that not only in education does Gates do this. Perhaps the fact that teachers are smart led to the quick realisation that Gates was selfishly doing harm and there was a triumph over Gates’ well-funded PR operation, which includes bribing politicians and newspapers. We hope that in the coming years it will become a regular thing in the press to cover Gates’ abuses in many other areas, not just obvious ones like investment in oil giants, ALEC, G4S, tobacco, and GMO. Gates is a sociopath just like the Kochs, and one with pockets so deep that he can bribe a lot of people to bamboozle the majority and ridicule (at times even suspend/fire) his opposition. █

Publicly-funded NHS Would Enjoy Symbiotic Relationship With Free — as in Freedom — Software

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Public services should use Free/libre software

Medical equipment

Summary: Some of the latest attacks on FOSS and how these relate to the uprise of the affluent (seeking to privatise everything which is public and profit by domination over the state)

WE NOW KNOW and have evidence to prove that proprietary software is used for spying. The NHS should be especially moved by this as privacy in the health sector (patients’ data) is a sensitive matter. Some nations shrewdly move their health sector over to Free software, assuring security, privacy, and domestic control over function, not only data. It ought to have become abundantly clear that the NHS cannot secure patients’ data with Microsoft because both GCHQ (domestic) and NSA (foreign) use Windows back doors and can dig ‘dirt’ on people, even medical ‘dirt’ (with which to punish or marginalise people). New evidence [1-5] teaches us that even GNU/Linux users are specifically targeted (all they have to do is just casually step on a Linux-centric domain name), so this has nothing to do with national security (or even espionage) and everything to do with domination over society.

There is this report right now about Microsoft struggling to get money out of the NHS, which is incidentally adopting more and more FOSS (I know this because of my job). To quote The Register:

Microsoft is finding out that it doesn’t always pay to play nasty with large government customers: NHS procurement bosses are telling authorities and bodies to hold firm against a wave of licensing compliance threats.

As exclusively revealed by The Channel last week, Microsoft wrote to all 160 healthcare bodies across England in early June to warn them they had until the end of the month to cough up for extra licences, via the discounted PSA12 framework, or be charged private sector prices to settle their bills.

Someone new at TechDirt had the following take on it:

As is the case almost every time you let a subscription lapse, the entity on the other hand will cut you a deal just to get you back on the ledger. And like everyone else everywhere, the government — even with all its [well, not really its] money and power — is no different. Microsoft delivers bold pronouncements and dire warnings and the NHS hits the “remind me later” button and goes back to what it was doing.

For [corrupt 78278 agencies like the IRS faulty proprietary software may have worked well] (hiding evidence of misconduct), but the NHS cannot afford this. Sometimes loss of data causes loss of many lives. And speaking of the IRS, it should really tax the rich more, not run after the poor. The rich should contribute more towards services such as the NHS (the US does not have an equivalent yet).

The IRS seems to have gone totally rogue and its attack on FOSS could open the floodgate to trouble. The IRS recently signed a Microsoft deal/contract (we covered it at the time) and now it is making FOSS-hostile decisions which were not made before. This is reminiscent of the FOSS-hostile BBC (also taxpayers-funded), which was made this hostile after many executives from Microsoft UK had taken positions of power over there and Bill Gates paid the BBC numerous times.

“The public sector, and especially the NHS (for high impact on lives), must gradually move to Free/libre software.”Mr. Robert Pogson says that “IRS Attacks FLOSS” and asks: “When will the beast of bureaucracy figure out what it’s left and right hands are doing? I think this is a case where Obama should immediately sign an executive order declaring FLOSS organizations are charitable, educational, and scientific organizations contributing to the public good, rich or poor, a huge net benefit to society. Read the GPL! Is there anything not charitable about it?”

The rich are waging war on the poor, war on public healthcare (welfare of the poor), and war on citizens-funded media (sources of information for the masses), not just Free software that’s often developed by and for the less privileged (financially). While most of these are beyond the scope of this site, it is worth noting the role of FOSS and the impact on it.

The public sector, and especially the NHS (for high impact on lives), must gradually move to Free/libre software. It is imperative because of obligation to taxpayers and also autonomy/security. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. More NSA Fallout, Linux Time Warp, and the Ultimate OS

    In tonight’s news, the Linux Journal publishes more on the NSA surveillance of Linux users and the Electronic Frontier Foundation throws in their thoughts too. Wired.com has a look back at Linux including a funny video. And finally, Gary Newell asks if you want to help fund the ultimate operating system.

  2. Linux Journal is under NSA survillance as ‘extremist’ forum

    If you ever visited websites such as the Tor Project’s home page and even Linux Journal, there is a good chance that the National Security Agency (NSA) added you to its surveillance list. Well, this is according to top-secret source code for the NSA surveillance program called X-Keyscore.

  3. NSA targets Linux Journal as ‘extremist forum’: Report

    The NSA is targeting the Linux Journal as an “extremist forum” and flagging its readers as ‘extremists’, according to source code leaked to German public broadcaster, ARD.

  4. Are you an extremist?

    Since the news broke yesterday that we are an extremist publication according to the NSA, we at Linux Journal have thought a lot about what that might mean to our readers.

    I am one of our readers, and I know many of our readers personally. That said, I can certainly describe many of us as “extreme” in a variety of ways. We’re extremely passionate about our hobbies and professions, extremely excited by innovative technology, and extremely supportive of the open source software community. So maybe we are extremists.

    With these things in mind, we thought perhaps our readers might like to join us in letting our extremist flags fly by “stamping” your online profile pictures with our Linux Journal reader extremist seal of approval.

  5. Dear NSA, Privacy is a Fundamental Right, Not Reasonable Suspicion

    Learning about Linux is not a crime—but don’t tell the NSA that. A story published in German on Tagesschau, and followed up by an article in English on DasErste.de today, has revealed that the NSA is scrutinizing people who visit websites such as the Tor Project’s home page and even Linux Journal. This is disturbing in a number of ways, but the bottom line is this: the procedures outlined in the articles show the NSA is adding “fingerprints”—like a scarlet letter for the information age—to activities that go hand in hand with First Amendment protected activities and freedom of expression across the globe.

07.04.14

Links 4/7/2014: E19 Alpha 2, KDevelop 4.7.0 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Land of the Free, or Home on the Open Range?

    Here in the Linux community, there’s never any shortage of opportunities to wax philosophical about the success of our favorite operating system. After all, the traditional (read: proprietary) model had nothing to do with it, strictly speaking, so FOSS fans can’t be blamed for wanting to extol the virtues of the free and open source model instead.

  • Netflix goes open-source with AWS security tool

    Known as one of the biggest customers of Amazon Web Server (AWS), Netflix’s use of custom tools aimed at enhancing its AWS capabilities – known as the Simian Army – are well-known, and now they’re going open-source with one aimed at security monitoring.

  • Netflix open sources its Amazon cloud security enforcer
  • Managing passwords the open source way

    At this point, I have more usernames and passwords to juggle than any person should ever have to deal with. I know I’m not alone, either. We have a surfeit of passwords to manage, and we need a good way to manage them so we have easy access without doing something silly like writing them down where others might find them. Being a fan of simple apps, I prefer using pass, a command line password manager.

  • Old school: I work in DOS for an entire day

    Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.

  • Bitcoin ATMs Beef Up Their Financial Services
  • Lamassu Releases Open Source Software For Their Bitcoin ATM Network

    New Hampsire-based Lamassu — the manufacturer of one of the leading bitcoin ATMs available today — has announced the release of something they are calling Rakía, a brand-spanking-new open source back-end system that will redefine how the company’s network of ATMs in use around the world are utilized by customers.

  • Lamassu Introduces Open-Source Software for Bitcoin ATM Network

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Rust programming language at critical stage

        At this year’s Great Wide Open conference, Steve Klabnik gave a talk about Mozilla’s Rust programming language. Klabnik previously authored an introductory Rust tutorial entitled Rust for Rubyists, and this talk serves a similar purpose. However, instead of being Ruby focused, this talk was aimed at programmers in general. Hence the talk’s title: Rust for $LANGUAGE-ists.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Getting everyone on the same open-source cloud page

      At June 2014′s Linux Enterprise User Summit on Wall Street, Alan Clark, SUSE’s director of industry initiatives and open source and chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, explained why and how to deploy open-source clouds in your business.

    • Survey: Hadoop Not the Answer for Big Data Diversity

      The problem with Big Data today is not its scope, but rather the diverse forms it takes. That’s according to a survey out this week from database vendor Paradigm4, which also said Hadoop may not be as useful as all the hype suggests.

    • Opposites attract: The necessary marriage of open source and enterprise software

      The Map-Reduce batch jobs take time. Hadoop works best with long-running batch jobs – a 20 second start-up time on a 5 hour batch run is immaterial, but a 20 second start-up time on a 5 second query is a serious disadvantage. Hadoop really is not the right technology for real-time analysis.

    • Creating an OpenStack community locally

      Learning is easier with a community of practice. For some in the open source world, community is something that takes only a virtual form, but there’s still a lot of value in good old fashioned face-to-face communities to share and learn together. Taking a page out of the book of Linux User Groups (LUGs), several advocates for open source projects have found the population of interested users in their area to have reached the critical mass necessary to build and sustain local user groups of their own.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • BSD

    • Intel Is Trying To Support The x32 ABI For LLVM/Clang

      While adoption of the Linux x32 ABI hasn’t really taken off with most developers and end-users doing just fine with x86_64-compiled software, Intel is trying to get things back on track for supporting x32 by LLVM and Clang.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Apache open source enhancements for Dutch government

      Auckland consulting company Sosnoski Software Associates Limited is please to announce the completion of enhancements to ApacheTM CXFTM open source software as commissioned by the government of the Netherlands. These enhancements have fixed several errors in the Apache CXF implementation of Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM), brought it into compliance with the latest WSRM 1.2 version, and also corrected long-standing problems in how the Apache CXF implementation combines WS-Security with WSRM. The changes provide greatly enhanced interoperability for exchanging messages with other software packages.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Local Motors Working on Open-Source Lightweight Sports Car

    • Open Data

      • Is open data living up to the hype? One data journalist weighs in

        Journalism is one profession that has embraced open source. Open source enables smaller organizations with little or no budget to effectively extend their news gathering capabilities. It’s not just smaller news organizations who’ve been adopting open source—The New York Times recently unveiled a new open source content management system.

      • Study: Open Data Produces Twice the Growth of TTIP

        Open data has been discussed here on Open Enterprise for years, and it’s probably true to say that it has entered the mainstream, at least as far as the readership of Computerworld UK is concerned. Nonetheless, it’s always good to have more studies of its impact, and of its potential for wider use in the future. A new report commissioned by the Omidyar Network from Australian researchers is particularly welcome because it focuses not on the wishy-washy virtues of sharing, or even its efficiency, but on the economic benefits of open data.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Doctors unite to increase access to quality health information

        Six years ago, Dr. James Heilman was working a night shift in the ER when he came across an error-ridden article on Wikipedia. Someone else might have used the article to dismiss the online encyclopedia, which was then less than half the size it is now. Instead, Heilman decided to improve the article.

    • Open Hardware

      • The Novena Open Hardware Laptop: A Hacker’s Dream Machine

        That said, the Novena laptop’s experimental technology has the potential to offer new options to a sluggish computer industry. Novena is an open-hardware computing platform that is flexible and powerful. It is designed for use as a desktop, laptop or standalone board.

        Two engineers cofounded Sutajio Ko-usagi, an operations-oriented company focused on the manufacturing and sales of hardware to OEMs and hobbyists.

        Since Sutajio Ko-usagi is difficult to pronounce in English, the Novena developers shortened it to “Kosagi,” noted cofounder Andrew “Bunnie” Huang. Huang also runs the IP-oriented Bunniestudios…

  • Programming

    • Python Foundation uncoils as membership opens up

      By relaxing its rather constrictive membership process, The Python Software Foundation is starting to uncoil. And Nick Coghlan, Provisioning Architect in Red Hat Engineering Operations, couldn’t be happier.

Leftovers

  • 220 People Attend David Cameron “Rally for the Union”.

    That the Prime Minister of the UK cannot fill a hall, at least to not embarrassingly empty, at an event billed as a “rally” to “save” his country, at which he stated that to lose the referendum would “break his heart”, is astonishing.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • PhRMA Wants US To Use TAFTA/TTIP To Stop EU Releasing Basic Drug Safety Information

      What’s worrying is that there’s already been one attempt to water down these requirements. Der Tagesspiegel suggests this may have been as a result of pressure from the European Commission, concerned about US reaction to them. It will be interesting to see how the Commission reconciles any US demands during the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations to remove the requirement to publish drug safety information with the new EU regulation that requires it.

    • Domino’s Pizza staff pictured buying 59p Aldi potato wedges to sell as their own for £3.49

      Domino’s Pizza staff have been caught buying potato wedges from Aldi and fobbing them off as their own.

      A worker at the Domino’s branch in Linlithgow, West Lothian, was photographed buying bags of wedges for 59p each from a nearby branch of the budget supermarket.

      Domino’s then sold these to their customers for a massively marked-up £3.49 a portion

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Israeli Settlers Blamed for Murder of Abducted Palestinian Teen; Dozens Wounded in West Bank, Gaza
    • Polish-American alliance worthless

      The publication of Radoslav Sikorski’s comments in the Polish weekly magazine Wprost will not help his bid to become the European Union’s foreign policy chief, but there are senior foreign policy officials elsewhere who might be tempted to make similar remarks (though perhaps not in alcohol-fuelled conversations in well-known restaurants where they might be overheard). And there are those in Washington who are saying the same thing.

    • Permanent War

      A bipartisan panel of high-profile figures from the national security establishment recently completed its report on the United States’ policy surrounding drones. Of the panel’s several conclusions, the one that understandably received the most attention in the media was the concern that the ease with which the U.S. is able to conduct drone operations creates a “slippery slope” that could lead to a state of permanent war. In this scenario, no longer will there be clearly defined periods of war and peace, but rather a vague, endless conflict, whereby the U.S. Government can and will assert the right to target and kill anyone, anywhere, with virtually no meaningful legal, political, or ethical constraints. The panel also criticized the “secret rationales” behind this “long-term killing” and the “lack of any cost-benefit analysis” conducted by the government regarding the entire enterprise.

    • The Errant Drone and Other Tales

      One camera operator gave a chronically nervous pilot of a predator drone a helpful piece of advice while the pilot was waiting to take off: “Stop saying ‘uh oh’ while you’re flying. It’s never good. Like going to the dentist or a doctor. . .oops. What the f—you mean oops?” According to the Post report, shortly after this exchange the drone “rammed a runway barrier and guardhouse. “Whoa” the pilot said. “I don’t know what the hell just happened.”

      It would be interesting to know what the pilots who have accidentally killed civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and other places say when they realize their mistakes. Probably something more than “oops” or “I don’t know what the hell just happened.” We will probably find out as the number of drones continues to climb and kill.

    • An Eye for An Eye

      Interesting. Seems Obama’s forgotten Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the teenager and US citizen on his Kill List, incinerated in a CIA-led drone strike. Obama can’t imagine the indescribable pain that this young man’s parent (singular) feels. That’s singular because the boy’s father, Anwar al-Awlaki also was on Obama’s Kill List and droned two weeks before the death of his son. The attack in Yemen on Oct 14, 2011 that killed the young al-Awalaki also killed his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians as they sat in a restaurant. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was 16, the same age as two of the Israelis, but the murder of al-Awlaki was, well, sensible, to Obama.

    • From Bannu: Writing the saddest lines…

      These children have seen beheadings, target killings, drone attacks, bombings, shelling and the closure of their schools. I pondered upon how these innocent children have spent their entire lives witnessing terrible violence that adults my age have not seen.

    • Trial venue for military killing sparks outrage

      An American soldier charged by the military with the murder of a 26-year-old woman in Panama will be tried in the United States, sparking protests by women’s groups and outraged family members.

    • Chilean court rules US played key role in Pinochet murder of Americans

      A Chilean court issued a ruling Monday that the commander of US military forces in Chile played a pivotal role in the murder of two US citizens following the September 1973 coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet as dictator.

    • The U.S. National-Security State’s Murder of Two Americans

      A Chilean court ruled this week that the U.S. national-security state conspired to murder American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile in 1973. The brutal act occurred during the violent military coup in which the Chilean military, with the full support of the U.S. government, ousted the democratically elected president of the country, Salvador Allende, and replaced him with an unelected brutal military dictatorship headed by Chilean General Augusto Pinochet.

    • Modern Terrorism: An American ‘Success’ Story

      In 2000, terrorism – at least as we know it today – didn’t exist in the Middle East, particularly not in Iraq and Syria. However, the American invasion of ancient Mesopotamia absolutely changed the existing order. In addition to its introduction into the region, it has transformed into a radicalizing cross-border scourge. That was only possible, and is this really a paradox? – through the logistical and strategic support of the United States, to what would become al-Qaeda, to Islamist movements operating in Afghanistan from 1980-1990, and for movements trained by the CIA and financed by Saudi Arabia. If we don’t go back to the origins of what is now a global scourge, and if we fail to properly define this phenomenon, we can neither understand its international expansion let alone eradicate it.

    • About Iraq

      You do not fix history with a drone. What we are witnessing today in Iraq is the slow collapse of a century-long geopolitical partition drawn up in a secret document by United Kingdom and France, in one of their last acts as imperial powers.

    • Iraq: Policy failure, not intelligence failure

      Declassified portions of both National Intelligence Estimates on Iraq in 2007 highlighted concerns about stability, violence and the Iraqi army. In November, the intelligence community noted, “However, the level of overall violence, including attacks on and casualties among civilians, remains high; Iraq’s sectarian groups remain unreconciled; AQI retains the ability to conduct high-profile attacks; and to date, Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively.”

    • On US TV, Israel is ‘Striking Back’

      It should go without saying that the killings of the Israeli youths do not justify the killing of innocent Palestinians, any more than the six Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military so far this year legitimize the murder of the Israeli teens.

    • Right-Wing Mythology Creeps Into Washington Post Benghazi Timeline

      The Washington Post misleadingly described the timeline of the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 Benghazi attacks by privileging the conservative media myth that President Obama did not immediately identify the attacks as an act of terror.

    • German defence minister backs ‘European armed drone’

      Procurement of so-called fighter drones to protect German armed forces remains controversial, but Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen has finally disclosed her plans for the aircraft: The German military should receive drones, she said, but these can only be deployed with parliamentary approval. EurActiv Germany reports.

    • NYC Bar Association Releases Report on Legality of Drones

      Interested readers can access the report and the executive summary from the NYC Bar Association’s website. The press release accompanying the report’s release is also copied below the fold.

    • Blair embodies corruption and war. He must be sacked

      Now he’s advising the Egyptian dictatorship, his removal as Middle East peace envoy is a moral and democratic necessity

    • The Battle Behind the Lens

      Almost 5,000 American troops were killed in the Iraq War, and it’s estimated that from 100,000 to more than 600,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, died. Many more combatants and noncombatants alike were physically or emotionally wounded.

    • OP-ED: Pay No Attention to the Apocalypse Behind the Curtain

      In 8 days, on July 10th Mary Ann Grady-Flores, a grandmother from Ithaca, NY, is scheduled to be sentenced to up to one year in prison. Her crime is violating an order of protection, which is a legal tool to protect a particular person from the violence of another particular person. In this case, the commander of Hancock Air Base has been legally protected from dedicated nonviolent protesters, despite the protection of commanding his own military base, and despite the protesters having no idea who the guy is. That’s how badly the people in charge of the flying killer robots we call drones want to avoid any questioning of their activity entering the minds of the drone pilots.

    • Kurdistan

      An independent Kurdistan is a difficult sell because it is supported by such horrible people – Benjamin Netanyahu and every far right Republican in the US you can think of. Tony Blair is probably holding back on his endorsement until offered a huge consultancy fee or preferential access to “commercial opportunities” in the country.

    • Why Is The Media Taking These ISIS World Domination Maps So Seriously?

      In a rush to sensationalize growing violence in Iraq at the hands of religious extremists, media have circulated dubiously sourced maps which purport to illustrate plans for a future Islamic caliphate that extends from Spain to the southern and easternmost reaches of India.

    • Drones, Accidents, and Secrecy

      The Washington Post recently ran some amazing articles on the safety record of drones. The three-part series focuses on the more than 400 large U.S. military drones that have crashed overseas, domestic U.S. crashes of military drones inside and outside military airspace, and the record of incidents of small drones coming dangerously close to civilian aircraft within the United States. Fortunately nobody has been killed in any crashes yet, but it all makes for gripping reading.

    • Secret U.S. memo suggests no legal basis to charge Omar Khadr with war crimes
    • Drone memo should reverse Guantanamo Bay convictions

      Omar Khadr was only 15 years old when he was captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and taken to the Bagram Air Base, then Guantanamo, where he later pleaded guilty to murder in violation of the laws of war — according to military prosecutors, Khadr tossed a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer.

    • Omar Khadr war crimes charges lack legal basis, U.S. memo suggests
    • Secret memo on CIA drone killings reveals U.S. had no legal basis to charge Omar Khadr with war crimes: lawyers

      A previously secret memo on CIA involvement in drone killings is casting new doubt on whether the American government had any legal basis to prosecute Canada’s Omar Khadr for war crimes.

      In fact, Khadr’s lawyers argue in new filings to the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, the document by the Dept. of Justice emphatically rejects any such legal foundation, and say his convictions at Guantanamo Bay should be set aside immediately.

    • US drone policy: Little prospect of rethink

      A new report on the consequences of America’s increasing use of drones as a counter-terrorism tool caused quite a stir in US national security circles last week, largely because it was written by a task force made up of many individuals who formerly reported to the Obama Administration.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Intel Report Targets Green Groups

      India’s intelligence agency has targeted an adviser to the Prince of Wales as well as British environmental activists in a campaign against foreign groups that it claims are a threat to its economy.

  • Finance

    • Income and Wealth Inequality in England

      First of all, there are some advantages to living in the U.K. that people at all income levels share. One can be outside in the summer time without getting eaten alive by mosquitoes (but bring an umbrella!). Restrictions on architecture and building mean that a lot of towns are beautiful and/or charming. Consider the value of a stroll around Paris compared to a stroll around a typical U.S. city. Due to a more or less free market in air travel and short distances, flights to interesting locations in Europe are affordable to everyone.

    • Fox Business Host: Jobs Report Might Be “Too Good”

      Fox Business host Charles Payne tried to put a negative spin on the news that the unemployment rate fell in June, tweeting that it might be “too good for the stock market.”

    • The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

      You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine. Multiple homes, my own plane, etc., etc. You know what I’m talking about. In 1992, I was selling pillows made by my family’s business, Pacific Coast Feather Co., to retail stores across the country, and the Internet was a clunky novelty to which one hooked up with a loud squawk at 300 baud. But I saw pretty quickly, even back then, that many of my customers, the big department store chains, were already doomed. I knew that as soon as the Internet became fast and trustworthy enough—and that time wasn’t far off—people were going to shop online like crazy. Goodbye, Caldor. And Filene’s. And Borders. And on and on.

    • More Abuse Of Presidential Power-Operation Choke Point

      This is the type of political corruption we would expect from a banana republic

    • Meet the CEO Bold Enough to Kill Thousands of Jobs

      And what about the workers who are shown the door? Well, there’s no nightly newscast report about them.

    • Bitcoin quietly goes legit

      The US Marshals Service doesn’t normally make economic policy but this week they apparently did so by auctioning 30,000 Bitcoins, a crypto currency I have written about before. This auction effectively legitimizes Bitcoins as part of the world economy. Am I the only one to notice this?

      My first column on this subject was a cautionary tale pointing out the two great areas of vulnerability for Bitcoin: 1) the US Government might declare Bitcoins illegal, and; 2) someone might gain control of a majority of Bitcoins in which case their value could be manipulated. While number two is still theoretically possible it becomes less likely every day. And number one seems to have been put to rest by the U.S. Marshals.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Public Service

      I had an impeccable source that Obama’s anti-Scottish statement was orchestrated not only with him, but with the BBC who planted the question. I have no doubt it is true. I want to take this further with the Electoral Commission and the BBC Trust, but to do that I need confirmation of my whistleblower’s account.

    • Liquid Lies Revisited

      There never was a liquid bomb plot. It was proven in court not to exist. It was a fabrication of the minds governing a Pakistani torture chamber.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Air travellers need targeted protection

      As we face tightened security at airports, it is questionable whether mass screening is a sensible use of resources

    • Hike in airport security may be permanent, says Nick Clegg

      Increase in security measures are not a ‘blip’ but reflect the evolving threat of terrorists and extremist groups from around the world, says Deputy Prime Minister

    • NYPD brutally arrest man on subway ‘for sleeping on way from work’ (VIDEO)

      A video has recorded a violent altercation erupting between a man on a New York City subway and police officers, who apparently arrested him for the crime of nodding off while commuting home for work.

    • UK airport security stepped up after new US bomb terror threat

      Airport security is being increased at British airports after the United States called for heightened precautions amid reports two terror networks are working together on a bomb that could evade existing measures.

    • Open government is vital, but beware the deep state

      On the other hand, the currency of the anti-surveillance movement is distrust: it sees governments as adversaries, and thus it fights not just for greater disclosure of what the surveillance state is doing, but rallies the public to fight back by hardening themselves against spies. The problem is that we actually appear to have two governments under one roof. There is the one we elect and the one that does its best to ignore elections.

    • Independence Day, 2014
    • This Independence Day, America Again Has a Monarch

      Then the government shot itself in the foot when it surreptitiously released a portion of its secret memo to NBC News. This infuriated the panel of federal appellate judges hearing the Times’ appeal, and they ordered the entire memo released. Either it is secret or it is not, the court thundered—and the government, which is bound by the transparency commanded by the First Amendment, cannot pick and choose which parts of its work to reveal to its favorite reporters and which to conceal from the rest of us.

    • Reflecting on the History of America’s Wars, Trying to Feel Patriotic on the Fourth of July

      My high school textbooks totally ignored the real histories of the conquistadores, the genocide of Native Americans and their cultures, and the truth about the actual brutality of the enslavement of Black Africans. My history books glorified America’s wars, and never mentioned America’s use of propaganda or how it was involved in fascist movements world-wide. The cold realities of sexism, militarism, poverty, corporate abuse, the banking system, etc. were glossed over. Sadly, my relative ignorance about the (obviously censored out of our consciousness) painful and unwelcome truths about what really happened in history is probably the norm.

    • Guest Opinion: Independence Day should celebrate liberty, not government overreach

      The mainstream media and opportunistic politicians have turned Independence Day into the opposite of what was intended.

    • NAPOLITANO: From an inherited tyrant to an elected one

      The Obama administration had successfully resisted the efforts of The New York Times and others to induce a judge to order the release of the memo by claiming that it contained state secrets. The judge who reviewed the memo concluded that it was merely a legal opinion, and yet she referred to herself as being in “Alice in Wonderland”: The laws are public, and the judicial opinions interpreting them are public, so how could a legal opinion be secret? Notwithstanding her dilemma, she accepted the government’s absurd claims, and The New York Times appealed.

    • ACLU’s Report on Police Militarization Finds Weapons and Tactics of War Used Disproportionately Against People of Color
    • Highly Placed Media Racists

      For his part, Brooks praised a Sailer article in the American Conservative (12/20/04) promoting a movement that saw white people, as Brooks would have it, flouting Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the “disorder, vulgarity and danger” of cities to move to “clean, orderly” suburban and exurban settings where they can “protect their children from bad influences.”

    • Street Talk: Celebrating the Farce of July with illumination

      But what are we celebrating, exactly? We’re living in a time when the government spies on us without abandon. They listen to our calls, read our emails and watch us with drones. We’ve got our NSA, your DHS, your NDAA and your Patriot Act nudging us toward a police state and what lies beyond. Your government, the one you celebrate with firecrackers and 12-packs of beer, can jail you any time, without reason and for as long as they’d like, thanks to the mother of all un-American laws passed quietly, with very little protest or discussion, at the start of 2012.

    • Thailand deports ex-resistance leader to Laos

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EFF Changes Position On Net Neutrality: Recognizes FCC Must Act, But Narrowly

      For years, the EFF has pushed back against the FCC’s attempts to preserve net neutrality, reasonably worrying that it might open the door to the FCC further meddling in the internet where it had no real mandate. We here at Techdirt have been similarly concerned. As we’ve noted, net neutrality itself is important, but we were wary of FCC attempts to regulate it creating serious unintended consequences. However, over the past few years, the growth in power of the key broadband internet access providers, and their ability to degrade the internet for profit, has made it quite clear that other options aren’t working.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The European Commission Wants to Bring Back ACTA Through the Back Door!

      As the current European Commission sees out its last days following the European elections, it has just published an “Action Plan to address infringements of intellectual property rights in the EU” reusing some of the major concepts of the ACTA agreement that was rejected by the European Parliament in 2012 following an important citizen mobilisation. Its contents are also inspired by proposals pushed by France at the European level1, letting fear an increased implication of technical intermediaries in the enforcement of copyright and their progressive transformation into a private copyright police force.

      By reusing the objective of fighting against “commercial scale” counterfeiting, the Commission has chosen to reactivate one of the worst mechanisms of the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA. This vague expression threatens to include non-commercial online sharing activities and introduces the same legal uncertainty which was at the heart of the citizen mobilisation against ACTA, right up to its final rejection by the elected representatives of the Parliament.

      The same commissioners who pushed ACTA, Karel de Gucht and Michel Barnier, now seem to be considering bypassing the European Parliament to implement this fight against “commercial scale” counterfeiting. They are in fact planning to introduce “non-legislative measures” implying the signature of simple agreements between representatives of the cultural industries and technical providers, like advertising agencies and online payment services.

      These measures are directly inspired from the May 2013 Lescure Report and from the Imbert-Quaretta Report [fr] recently published in France, which La Quadrature has already denounced as potentially leading to an exra-judicial application of copyright law, converting these intermediaries in a private copyright law police force [fr]. The Commission wishes that such a system be generalized in the European Union through “Memoranda of Understanding”, providing a framework for contractual agreements negociated by private players.

      Such methods will lead to the bypass of democratic procedures of control. But the Commission also proposes to reinforce the protection of intellectual property at an international level with multilateral negociations. Such statements give good reason to fear that, once again, as with the ACTA agreement, or as foreseen for the CETA and TAFTA agreements, “intellectual property” questions will be treated in an opaque way during free trade agreements, leaving elected representatives with hardly any leeway.

    • Airbus submits patent application for windowless jet cockpit

      An article published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer yesterday evening describes a patent application from European aerospace company Airbus in which pilots fly aircraft entirely through electronic means. The patent application, number US20140180508 A1, is titled “Aircraft with a cockpit including a viewing surface for piloting which is at least partially virtual” and notes that while an aircraft’s cockpit must be located in its nose to afford its pilot forward visibility, the physical requirements of the cockpit’s shape and the amount of glass required are aerodynamically and structurally non-optimal.

    • Copyrights

      • One-Percent Authors Want To End Destructive Conflict, Bring Order to the Galaxy

        Amazon is not boycotting anyone. All books by all Hachette authors are available in the Amazon store. In the face of this, to claim there’s a “boycott” is either ignorance or propaganda.

      • Hollywood Goes After Korean Fans Subtitling Soap Operas, Pressing Criminal Charges

        We’ve written a few times in the past about the movie and TV industries irrationally freaking out over fans in other countries providing subtitles for works that aren’t being released locally in that language. These are always labor-of-love efforts by fans who want to share the work more widely by providing the subtitles that the studios themselves refuse to offer. And yet, because of standard copyright maximalism, these efforts almost always end up leading to legal action.

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