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06.25.14

Patent Lawyers Fail to Grasp That Software Ideas Rather Than Code Are Abstract and Hence Cannot Endure a Proper Court’s Test

Posted in Courtroom, Deception, Patents at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The LLP echo chamber

Businessman

Summary: Heaps of editorials and analyses from patent-centric firms pretend that nothing has changed after the Supreme Court abolished patents on “abstract ideas” (as opposed to working implementations)

POTENTIALLY substantial patent changes are afoot, especially owing to a decision from SCOTUS. A new article by Timothy B. Lee chastises this court for not understanding technology, which is a typical problem with judges. “The Supreme Court doesn’t understand software, and that’s a problem,” says Lee. “Patent litigation has become a huge problem for the software industry. And on Thursday, the Supreme Court could have solved that problem with the stroke of a pen. Precedents dating back to the 1970s place strict limits on software patents. The court could have clearly reiterated that those old precedents still apply, and that they rule out most patents on software.

“Instead, perhaps fearing the backlash from invalidating billions of dollars worth of patents, the court took an incremental approach. It ruled that the specific patent at issue in the case was invalid. But it didn’t articulate any clear rules for software patents more generally. In effect, the court kicked the can down the road, leaving a huge question mark floating over most software patents.”

SCOTUS can hardly distinguish between UML, pseudo code, and source code. The ambiguities left behind are already being exploited by patent lawyers and here is a new example from Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, another from Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C., and one from Choate Hall & Stewart LLP, to name just three (these flood the media these days, day after day). Well, at first came lots of media reports (written by journalists) declaring a lot of software patents dead and later came (and still comes) the flood of “analyses” by lawyers, rewriting the history to assure their clients that it is worth patenting software and that nothing has really changed.

In recent days we found more examples from Proskauer Rose LLP, saying that “Applying this rationale, the Court found that the claims at issue recited computer steps that are “purely conventional” and a “basic function[] of a computer.”15 The Supreme Court therefore affirmed the Federal Circuit and held the claims were ineligible under § 101.”

The SCOTUS decision was too weak in some sense and law firms are spinning it in their favour. Here is an example where the title says “Supreme Court silent on general eligibility of software patents” (not entirely true). Cooley LLP , Fenwick & West LLP, Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Lathrop & Gage LLP also try to assure their clients that patenting more algorithms is OK, as if nothing has changed. “Although the Court’s decision provides some clarity concerning the inventive effect of reciting computer implementation within patent claims,” says the last analysis, “there remains some ambiguity concerning how courts will define “abstract ideas” moving forward (indeed, the Court stated that it “need not labor to delimit the precise contours of the ‘abstract ideas’ category in this case”).”

Code is already copyrighted, so one might argue that patenting anything but code would be patenting “abstract ideas”. Suffice to say, this is not what greedy patent lawyers are going to tell customers for whom they produce useless papers that the USPTO almost blindly stamps for approval.

Patent lawyers continue to rely on the ignorance or gullibility among judges (who are themselves lawyers and are rarely technical enough to grasp programming). Perhaps any court that deals with patents should have an imperative to be technical. CAFC, for example, needs to be abolished for being corrupt and also utterly dumb on technology. █

Facebook and Microsoft Openwashing Alert

Posted in Microsoft at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Incredible Hulk and Facebook

Summary: Countering the very disturbing marketing illusion that Facebook and its (in part) owner Microsoft are warming up to FOSS while in reality they hoard patents and use them offensively

Surveillance giant and meta-advertising company Facebook has been running an effective campaign to openwash its data centres, hardware, programming tools, and software, despite the fact that Facebook is proprietary and very malicious. Facebook is also partly owned by Microsoft and passes its data to Microsoft, which uses people's data against them. Facebook, like Microsoft, is close to the NSA and we noted in daily links, there is a high-profile European court case dealing with it.

Facebook not only started with misappropriation of source code (Mark Zuckerberg took over people’s work that they had paid him for) but also with unoriginal ideas. There were sites like Facebook before it (far less privacy-infringing), well before Zuckerberg scraped people’s faces off Web sites to make his first controversial site that got him in a lot of disciplinary trouble.

There is a patent case underway, potentially showing Facebook’s lack of originality. The plaintiff is a Dutch programmer, not a patent troll. It is going to be interesting to see how it ends up, not just because it involves darn patents but because it may teach Facebook, which hoards patents, a lesson about the harms of software patents. While Facebook tries to openwash its operations it is a usually patenting a lot of basic software ideas and also using these to sue companies. How ‘open’ is that? Patent extortion, just like Microsoft.

“Facebook is also partly owned by Microsoft and passes its data to Microsoft, which uses people’s data against them.”The UBM-run Dr. Dobbs continues its campaign of openwashing of Microsoft, especially courtesy of Mono and .NET booster Andrew Binstock (he is the Executive Editor of the site). Here he is paying lip service to Microsoft again, giving it much needed help it by using the “.NET section” of a news site to openwash .NET. “How far the company has come from its early dismissal of open source,” says Binstock, but has he really paid attention? The very fact that Andrew Binstock is the Executive Editor should say a lot about whose agenda is served at Dr. Dobbs these days (after the acquisition).

Microsoft’s Android pretense, as mentioned the other day, is that it is actually a backer while in reality it extorts Android and runs a program for ‘licensing’ Android (which is not a Microsoft product). When Microsoft ‘tips’ an Android phone it should not be shocking because it is part of the plan to legitimise extortion, pretending (e.g. to regulators) that Microsoft is not a hostile actor. At the same time as this article there is an unusually high volume of articles with Microsoft revisionism along those lines.

Overall, these campaigns of openwashing and especially the efforts from Microsoft boosters like Binstock ought to remind us to keep our eyes open and our brains working. There is a deception endeavour going on. In some internal documents that came out through legal action Microsoft speaks very explicitly of the needs for such endeavours. █

Financial Perspective of Patents Misses the Reality of Patent Monopolies

Posted in Patents at 10:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Obsession with shares instead of sharing

Stocks

Summary: Deviation from the mentality which says ideas should be patented and ‘protected’ (meaning that others are prevented from using similar ideas) based on new examples from the media

THE world of MBAs is vastly different from that of engineers. When all that matters is oneself (financially), then the notion of sharing makes little sense, as long as one can exploit or hoard others’ work (the selfish approach). This is why, despite engineers’ spirit of sharing (wanting to show their achievements), many companies continue to embrace secrecy and isolation.

Bloomberg (Wall Street-friendly press) gives its press platform to a famous patent troll, Jay Walker. This grooming piece is highly disturbing as it helps the likes of Walker (patent trolls) and the USPTO make patents seem almost synonymous with innovation (classic lie). Monopoly and protectionism are being spun as a wonderful thing. That’s what corporate media likes to do. It’s repeated so often that many people actually believe it without questioning.

“Monopoly and protectionism are being spun as a wonderful thing.”We recently countered the marketing nonsense that associated/conflated de-weaponising patents with becoming “open source”. Tesla did not open up designs of cars and make them downloadable or anything, but the corporate press sure helps Tesla’s marketing by stating that “Tesla founder has given away patents on electric car technology” (not given away actually). This is shameless PR for reasons that we highlighted before. “Elon Musk took the decision to invest heavily in patent protection. Without patents, Tesla won’t have any control over the commercial opportunities of its inventions,” says this generally poor coverage from the financial press (equating patents with currency). A Red Hat site did yet another article about this, saying that “Elon Musk and crew at Tesla Motors made some big waves last week. In case you missed this recent news roundup, it was announced that Tesla is effectively relinquishing their patent portfolio—particularly around charging stations.”

Here is a VC (venture capitalist) who opposes software patents (Fred Wilson is one of several) weighing in again. To quote: “If you did a topic analysis on AVC over the past 10+ years that I’ve been blogging, I suspect patent reform would rate highly. I’ve been advocating for eliminating software patents and cutting back patent protection broadly as loudly and frequently as I can. I believe that sharing intellectual property will lead to way more innovation than hoarding and protecting it. I’ve seen a huge amount of pain and agony inflicted on innovative companies by trolls and “inventors” who never did anything other than write their ideas down on paper. Having ideas is not innovation. Making something new and different and putting it into the market is innovation.”

So basically, several VCs too want to see a society that shares ideas. Patents may not be needed at all. Even investors can reject them. Patents are a threat when counterparts and trolls use them. Here is a post titled “What If Drug Patents Were Written Like Software Patents?” To quote: “Not happening, that one, and it’s a good thing. But stuff nearly that vague and idiotic is all over the software patent landscape. Such patents list a superficially impressive amount of detail about how their “invention” is to be implemented, but all too often, that scheme turns out to mean something like “Someone uses a computer to contact a web server” or “Someone turns on their mobile phone”. It would be as if we in the drug industry could enable our compounds by citing a few synthetic organic chemistry textbooks – that’s how you make ‘em, right there!”

In general, much of the whole patent hype is inherently bad, as it encourages isolation. Tesla is at least realising this after it wasted a lot of money patenting a lot of stuff. For that Tesla deserves some credit. It acknowledges its wasteful mistakes now, grasping a culture of sharing instead. The lesson we should learn from Tesla is not patents giveaway; we should learn from Tesla’s error and avoid this error by never patenting stuff in the first place. Tesla merely gave back what it took away. █

06.24.14

Distortion of Facts in Microsoft-Friendly News Sites

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The press is awash with Microsoft propaganda that negates truths, such as Microsoft as having “warmth towards open source” (like lawsuits), Microsoft having big share in virtualisation (based on revenue/sales alone), and Microsoft “continu[ing] Android push” (actually, extorting and derailing Android)

EVERY now and then we see some Microsoft openwashing that we are urged to respond to. There are some propaganda agents out there (some working directly for Microsoft) whose aim is to portray Microsoft as privacy-respecting, Open Source-friendly, law-obeying/abiding, and competition-respecting. Earlier today we saw a pro-Microsoft site saying that “Microsoft Refuses To Open Source VB6″, then issuing the following revisionist nonesense: “With Microsoft’s new warmth towards open source it seems a small thing to ask for VB6 to be open sourced.”

There is no “new warmth towards open source”, there is openwashing and propaganda, that’s all. Microsoft pretended to have open-sourced some very old software a few months ago, but that was a sheer lie, promoted for the most part by Microsoft-friendly sites that disregard facts. We need to keep track of such lies, which usually come from sites that have historically been linked to Microsoft (sometimes their writers come from Microsoft).

Here is the MSN-connected (Microsoft, and Microsoft Windows-run) Fool.com belittling Red Hat by warping the way one counts share in virtualisation (they count sales, but Free software is rarely actually sold). It’s the same propaganda line that Gartner and IDC use when it comes to servers share. They give the illusion that proprietary software dominates virtualisation, but that’s nonsense. VMware is linked to the NSA through RSA, and it is run by people from Microsoft (the NSA’s #1 PRISM partner and more). Like Hyper-V, VMware is proprietary and it probably facilitates back door access like Hyper-V does (Hyper-V runs on Windows, which has back doors, hence Hyper-V and every guest VM under it has an NSA back door). We need to find back against disinformation that belittles the share of GNU/Linux and Free software by framing it as a purely financial question.

The third example for today comes from an Android-hostile site. It now gives the illusion (again) that Microsoft supports Android rather than what it actually does. Microsoft extorts Android and derails it by trying to turn a portion of it into a Microsoft surveillance platform.

All the examples above show us not journalism but agenda disguised as reporting. Please report such coverage to us so that we can counter it. █

Microsoft’s OOXML Crimes Prevent Companies, Governments, and People From Exploring Alternatives to Microsoft

Posted in Fraud, Microsoft, Open XML at 11:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

OOXML: When crime pays off

Drug deal

Summary: Reports from the European Commission’s Web site reveal the degree to which OOXML is successfully derailing migrations to Free/libre software in the public sector

SOME of the criminals involved in the OOXML festival of corruption have already left Microsoft (e.g. Oliver Bell, who joined a Gates-funded Gates grooming operation) or joined Microsoft (e.g. Peter O’Kelly), so holding them accountable would be hard, especially now that years have passed and conditions have changed. Microsoft got away with a lot of crime, including bribery. Nobody was sent to jail or even put on trial. Microsoft is above the law, no doubt. It’s an international problem that we find also in the case of large banks, not just software companies with strong ties to the NSA for example.

According to this new report from the European Commission’s Web site, “Open source [is] hindered by OOXML incompatibilities” (as intended and planned by Microsoft). To qoute: “The mixing of outdated and incompatible versions of OOXML, an XML document format, is hindering implementation in open source office alternatives, according to a study published on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) today. The different OOXML versions also pose difficulties for public administrations that use different proprietary office suite versions, and the inconsistencies are causing problems with older documents. The OOXML document format is hindering the interoperability of suites of office productivity tools.”

There is also this accompanying report titled “Complex singularity versus openness”.

“Does not even mention ODF,” pointed out one of our readers about this article. “When M$ forced it’s XML file-format on the world for office suites it deliberately created lock-in,” wrote Pogson.

This once again reminds us why Microsoft went as far as criminal activities. It sought to prevent people all around the world from taking their data to better platforms or even create new data in formats that would continue to make the data accessible. To us at Techrights is has always been somewhat of an outrageous mystery that nobody was sent to jail for it. It shows that the system which purports to uphold justice is very arbitrary and unjust, with Microsoft positioned on the side of immunity while it helps secret agencies illegally violate rights of citizens. █

For Gamers, Not Only ‘Xbox’ Franchise is Dying But Also Windows

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 10:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Drop

Summary: “Games for Windows Live” may be dead; Steam Machines run GNU/Linux and Microsoft’s attempt to make hardware still fail very badly, and it extends beyond Xbox

THE other day I was approached by someone who had abandoned Windows for games. With Steam OS (and Steam for various other GNU/Linux distributions), one does not need Windows. Historically, many gamers said they kept Windows around just for games, but now the situation is being reversed. There are Windows users who turn to GNU/Linux just for the games. It’s a real problem for Windows and rumours say that Microsoft is officially shutting down “Games for Windows Live”. The ‘damage control’ from Microsoft, or the issuance of face-saving PR, really speaks volumes. “Reports of GFWL’s death have been greatly exaggerated,” says the subheader, but we already know, based on previous dead Microsoft products (many of them games-related), that this is just an attempt to play a linguistic game (semantics) to deny the inevitable. According to this other new review of Microsoft hardware (which has historically been a disaster like Xbox 360), “Microsoft’s latest tablet, the Surface Pro 3 [...] one of the hardest of its kind to repair, giving it a laughably low score of just one out of 10.”

The only thing that keeps Microsoft paid for the time being (and some people locked in) is Microsoft Office, owing to Microsoft crimes that the next post will recall. █

Links 24/6/2014: KDE Plasma Media Center 1.3, Linux Mint 17 KDE

Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • To Get Developer Adoption Today You Have To Build a Community

    Michael Williams, BIRT Product Evangelist & Forums Manager at Actuate, outlines some key points to keep in mind for building your own open source community.

  • Cisco developing open-source block ciphers

    Cisco says it is experimenting with ciphers it claims can better protect traffic privacy in cloud systems and result in bandwidth and storage savings.

  • Cisco Releases Open Source FNR Cipher

    Cisco has released a new open-source block cipher called FNR that is designed for encrypting small chunks of data, such as MAC addresses or IP addresses. The cipher is still in the experimental stage, but Cisco has released the source code and a demo application.

  • 12 challenges for open source projects

    Open source is the combined contributions of millions of independent volunteers. This single concept brings with it a few inherent realities. In this article let’s look at a few potentially concerning points about the nature of open source contributions.

    One of the major, oft-touted benefits of open source software is the diverse, large, and ever ready army of developers contributing to the project. This can be an incredibly powerful argument when demonstrating the value of open source to a corporation. However, the larger the community and the bigger the pool of contributors the more opportunity there exists for problems or potential security risks.

  • Events

    • Where’s the money in open source?’ – limited places for exclusive event

      Open source is a growing and arguably successful strategy for making our corner of the world a better place. While altruism motivates many individuals and some companies to make things open source, others are in it for the money. On the other hand, many companies use or are forced to use open source for its perceived cost-saving value, often disregarding its risks. So what’s the business case for open source?

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • ownCloud Conf coming… And REWE offers a cheap way to get there!

      ownCloud is organizing an ownCloud conference/hackathon at the Technische Universität Berlin this August. And as Steffen Lindner shared on twitter, the German REWE supermarket is offering cheap tickets to go to Berlin from all over Germany during the event!

    • OpenStack speaking opportunities, design guide book sprint, and more
    • Cloud trends point to PaaS, open source as the future

      As the cloud market matures, customer behavior is changing and questions remain about where the true value of the technology will lie in the future.

      A group of industry professionals tackled a variety of topics as part of a panel discussion on the future of the cloud last week at a Cloud Standards Customer Council symposium. They discussed the impact of savvy customers and looked ahead at trends around burgeoning cloud services, vendor lock-in issues and the role of open source.

    • Debate: How Many Open Source Platforms Are Enough?

      “When it gets there, we will support the OpenStack API,” Mikos relented.

      Dholakia noted that CloudStack, like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, has long maintained a “compatibility layer for the Amazon API precisely because, as business folk, we follow the dollars.”

    • GoGrid CEO John Keagy Building Coalition For Open Source Cloud Orchestration Engine

      Over the last several months, GoGrid CEO John Keagy has been quietly holding meetings with partners and rivals alike to share an ambitious plan.

      His brainchild has the potential to shake up the entire cloud services industry by uniting some of its largest players around an open source project: a universal cloud orchestration engine called OpenOrchestration.org.

  • Databases

  • CMS

    • 5 Factors to Help You Choose an Open-Source CMS

      Being able to present that content effectively depends on having the right foundation for your site, and that means choosing a content management system (CMS) that will best match up with your site’s intended purpose.

  • Healthcare

    • What’s behind the success of free and open source healthcare?

      I ask more questions in this survey of free and open source healthcare developers for my thesis project: “The state of open source electronic medical records: An anthropology study.” My goal is to better understand the characteristics, motivations, and knowledge background of healthcare developers in order to determine what is behind the success of free/open source software in healthcare.

  • BSD

    • Clang Is Already Working On “Highly Experimental” C++1z Support

      With LLVM developers already having lots of C++1y / C++14 support implemented, they have begun working on “highly experimental” support for C++1z — the next major revision to the C++ programming language anticipated for release in 2017.

      C++14/C++1y should be officially released this year as a small update over C++11, for which LLVM/Clang (and GCC) already have decent support. In fact, with the current Clang 3.4 stable release all of the key C++11 functionality should be in place.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Red Hat, Joyent, and others break down licensing barriers

      Open source is an environment where no permission is required to use the source code; the flexibility to do as you wish is already provided. The open source license creates this permissionless environment, and developers are able to gather around a source code commons to meet their individual needs without having to seek approval from anywhere. Requiring a CLA to contribute immediately obstructs this goal.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Should Everyone Learn to Code?

      “I do think that everybody should learn to code, at least on a basic level,” said Linux Rants blogger Mike Stone. “It would teach them to break down a problem into small, manageable portions and solve each of those parts logically.” It’s actually “less about the code itself than solving a problem logically,” he said. “That’s a skill that I think everybody should have.”

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Intel Expresses Interest In AMD’s Mantle API

      Intel has asked AMD about access to their Mantle technology for experimenting with this graphics API alternative to Direct3D and OpenGL.

      Intel and AMD confirmed to PCWorld that the two companies were communicating about Mantle cooperation but “[Intel] remains committed to what it calls open standards like Microsoft’s DirectX API.”

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Journalism Without Information

      I thought of that when I saw the new issue of Time magazine (6/30/14), which featured a short item on Kevin McCarthy, the new majority leader in Congress. As such, he is someone who certainly will be wielding enormous political power.

    • Scott Walker Says the Dark Money Probe Is ‘Over,’ but He’s Wrong

      The federal judge who halted the state investigation, Rudolph Randa, wrote an opinion so detached from First Amendment precedent, Wisconsin law, and the facts of the case that many legal experts believe that it will be reversed by the Seventh Circuit appellate court reviewing it. (Plus, Randa’s May 6 ruling was a preliminary ruling, not a final decision.) Other legal experts think Randa should not even be involved in the case, given that he is a regular attendee at “judicial junkets” funded by the Bradley and Koch foundations, which are closely tied to Walker and the group that filed the federal lawsuit, Wisconsin Club for Growth.

    • This Is the New Stat Facebook Should Be Worrying About

      “A solid majority of American adults say that social media have no influence at all on their purchasing decisions — suggesting that the advertising may be reaching smaller segments of the market, or that the influence on consumers is indirect or goes unnoticed,” Gallup concluded. The company said people are more likely to consult in-store displays, television commercials, mail catalogs and magazines than a brand’s Facebook or Twitter account when making a purchasing decision.

  • Censorship

    • Russia asks Twitter to block a dozen accounts

      Russia has asked Twitter to block access to a dozen accounts it deems “extremist”, the head of the country’s telecoms watchdog said, as Moscow seeks greater control over internet sites based beyond its borders.

  • Privacy

  • Rights

    • Lord Byron, Terrorist

      The dreadful violence and destruction the West has inflicted and promoted in recent years in its efforts to gain control of the mineral resources of the Middle East continues to play out. Those who see communities with which they identify abroad engaged in military conflict will always produce a small number of people going to join the fight. This is in no sense unusual, and in no sense a threat to ordinary citizens in the UK. The link to terrorism here is entirely a fiction. The unfortunate thing is that the mainstream media allows no outlet for people to mock its false assertions and point out its sinister agenda.

    • CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Advocates for Prison Sentencing Reform in New ‘Letter from Loretto’

      Reflecting on mass incarceration in the United States, which he has experienced firsthand during his time in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution of Loretto, Pennsylvania, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou advocates for prison sentencing reform in his latest letter from jail.

      Firedoglake has been publishing “Letters from Loretto” by Kiriakou, who was the first member of the CIA to publicly acknowledge that torture was official US policy under the George W. Bush administration. He was convicted in October 2012 after he pled guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) when he confirmed the name of an officer involved in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program to a reporter. He was sentenced in January 2013, and reported to prison on February 28, 2013.

    • Back to Black: Interrogation Sites on the High Seas
    • Senate’s CIA Torture Report Awaiting Final White House Approval

      The release of a long-delayed, $40 million Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s “rendition, detention and interrogation” program during the George W. Bush administration is pending final approval from the Obama White House, Politico reported.

    • CIA report now on to White House

      The Obama administration is inching toward declassification of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s controversial interrogation techniques.

      The Central Intelligence Agency has finished redacting sensitive information from a 500-page summary of the 6,800-page report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to make public in April, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an interview Monday night.

    • The growing Police State in America
    • Police violence and law enforcement militarization in the greater borderlands

      Slightly more than three months after the police shooting of homeless camper James Boyd catapulted Albuquerque into the international spotlight, activists returned to the streets to advance their movement against police brutality.

      On a blistering Summer Solstice Day, whose blazing mid-day sky was oddly crested by a half-moon, more than 200 people marched up Central Avenue near the University of New Mexico chanting “Justice Now” and “They say justified, we say homicide!”

    • Opinion: It’s Time for Civilian Oversight of OPD

      Based on the most recent report issued by federal monitor Robert Warshaw, the Oakland Police Department will most likely require months of additional monitoring by the court — after eleven years of failure to comply with the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA). No other city in the United States has required this length of time to bring its police department into compliance with a federal consent decree.

    • BRUCE: America’s expanding police state

      We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone. However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”

    • For The Last Time, Freedom Isn’t Free
    • 2014 Pioneer Award Nominations Are Now Open

      Nominations are now open for EFF’s 23rd Annual Pioneer Awards, to be presented this fall in San Francisco. EFF established the Pioneer Awards in 1992 to recognize leaders on the electronic frontier who are extending freedom and innovation in the realm of information technology. Nominations are open until midnight on Wednesday, July 2. Nominate the next Pioneer Award winner today!

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • New Open Source Firmware Encourages Wi-Fi Sharing

      The “Open Wireless Movement” was devised years ago by the EFF, Free Press, Mozilla and others to advocate for the sharing of broadband via publicly-accessible Wi-Fi hotspots. At the upcoming Hackers on Planet Earth conference, the group says they’re going to unveil new “Open Wireless Router” firmware that simplifies the process of safely and securely offering free Wi-Fi without hindering your own network.

    • What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality

      The only trouble is that, here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XXX

      As well as all the varied developments I discussed in the previous TTIP update, plenty has been happening recently in the hotly-contested area of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has published another of its informative reviews of developments in the ISDS field [.pdf]. This edition is particularly welcome since it focuses on the interaction between the EU and US.

    • Copyrights

      • UK ISPs Quietly Block More Torrent Site Proxies

        Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new domains to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. TorrentFreak was able to confirm that several popular torrent site proxies were added over the past weekend. However, the blocked domains have been quickly replaced by new ones, continuing the cat-and-mouse game that never seems to end.

      • The rules for using images from the internet

        Think it’s fine use downloaded images in your own website, poster or publication? You could be breaking copyright law… We show you how to use images legally and find free images that are available for commercial use.

06.23.14

Links 23/6/2014: New Releases of Opera, MakuluLinux, Netrunner

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • ARM Revolution

    • RUSSIA FINALLY MOVING TO */LINUX

      These will, of course, run some */Linux operating system. At the rate the government replaces PCs this changeover could take years or, if they accelerate the change, just a year or two. I expect countries like China and India have the will and ability to make such changes. This is a clever move because the savings on hardware could more or less pay for the cost of changing software. The move to */Linux accelerates.

    • Feasibility of desktop on ARM cpu

      Thinkpad X60 is old, Core Duo@1.8GHz, 2GB RAM notebook. But it is still pretty usable desktop machine, as long as Gnome2 is used, number of Chromium tabs does not grow “unreasonable”, and development is not attempted there. But eats a bit too much power.

      OLPC 1.75 is ARM v7@0.8GHz, .5GB RAM. According to my tests, it should be equivalent to Core Solo@0.43GHz. Would that make an usable desktop?

    • debootstrap, olpc, and gnome

  • Kernel Space

    • Open-Source Radeon Performance Boosted By Linux 3.16

      Besides the Nouveau driver performance being faster thanks to experimental re-clocking when using the Linux 3.16 kernel, there are also performance improvements to note with some generations of AMD graphics processors.

      The changes found within Linux 3.16 to benefit the Radeon DRM graphics performance are the GPU VM optimizations and large PTE support. Separate from this performance-related work for this kernel-side open-source AMD update is also HDMI deep color support, HDMI audio clean-ups, and other bug-fixes.

    • Transferring maintainership of x86info
    • Linux 3.16-rc2 gets a Saturday evening release

    • Graphics Stack

      • Gallium3D VDPAU & XvMC Support Are Now Single Libraries

        The start of the Gallium3D “mega drivers” patches by Emil Velikov are starting to land in Mesa. First up, the patches to consolidate the Gallium3D VDPAU and XvMC support into single libraries for supporting multiple drivers.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Debugging KF5 build failures

        Those familiar with running development versions of KDE software are familiar with the idea of having to sometimes remove their whole development install directory and “start all over” in order to resolve some types of build errors.

      • NetworkManager 0.9.10 Brings Many New Features
      • Section handling progress
      • Tracklist interface for Plasma Media Center

        I have completed the MPRIS specifications Tracklist interface for PMC. Now other applications can view and control the current playlist in PMC over DBus. This was a part of my GSoC project. This interface will allow me to send commands to PMC, asking it to play a particular song in the playlist. After some changes to the Simon MPRIS plug-in, a user will be able to play a song in the current playlist by naming it. As the Simon plug-in is itself based on MPRIS specifications, it will be able to interact with any media player following the MPRIS specs.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • MakuluLinux KDE 6.0 Released !

        The Long Awaited update to the KDE Edition is now over, Stability, Speed and Beauty is what drives this edition. This Edition is a special one for me because I worked on most of it while being extremely sick to the point where I could not walk, with nothing but a bed, laptop and time on my hands I went to work on this baby and this is the result.

      • Netrunner 14 released

        The Netrunner Team today released Netrunner 14 Frontier – 32bit and 64bit versions. The release follows Kubuntus support cycle, giving it a full 5 year support life via the backport repos.

      • Netrunner 14

    • Arch Family

      • KDE 4.13.2 Is Now Available In Manjaro 0.8.10

        Manjaro 0.8.10 has received its Update-Pack 1, getting regular kernel updates and latest upstream packages. This update adds some new Gnome3 packages, latest linux kernels, drivers and many updated applications needed for performing your tasks.

        According to the official announcement available in the Manjaro blog, KF5 got updated to 4.100 version, the latest mesa 10.2.1 with a better working mhwd is included and the following kernels are supported.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Debuts ‘Orange Box’ for Ubuntu OpenStack Cloud Demos

            Canonical’s Orange Box, the portable server cluster that the company intends to use to showcase OpenStack, MAAS, Juju and other aspects of the Ubuntu Linux-based cloud, is out. Here’s what it’s all about.

            For starters, it’s important to understand what the Orange Box is not: A revenue-generating hardware product from Canonical. The company has given no indication so far that it plans to sell these devices on a large scale—although if you truly want you can buy one, for the equivalent of around $12,900, from TranquilPC Limited, the company that has the contract for manufacturing them.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and 13.10 Updated with KDE 4.13.2

              “Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.13.2 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE,” said the leader of the Kubuntu project, Jonathan Riddell.

            • elementary OS Changes Its Codename from Isis to Freya

              Many users have raised this issue in the last few weeks and the elementary OS developers were forced to abandon the Isis codename in order to make sure that people don’t make any connections.

              “elementary obviously has no ties to the militant group known as ISIS – and we don’t think people will get us confused – but we want to both recognize the ongoing turmoil and choose a less controversial name. Freya is a Norse goddess of love and beauty. As we push our design forward, a goddess associated with beauty makes a lot of sense. And evoking the powerful emotion of love is always a good thing!” said the devs on their Google+ account.

            • Elementary OS “Isis” Is Now Freya

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Stroke and gestures now on Raspberry Pi touch screen

      The PiTFT is one of our favourite little things for the Raspberry Pi, making it much more portable than it naturally is and opening it up to many more cool projects than you could do before. The one thing it did lack was proper, modern touch screen controls such as swiping and gesture but this has now been added thanks to Xstroke.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Is a code of conduct vital to the success of an open source community?

    Late last month, the Debian project voted to adopt a community code of conduct, a set of guidelines for acceptable participation in its official communication channels. Members agreed to abide by the following principles:

    Be respectful
    Assume good faith
    Be collaborative
    Try to be concise
    Be open

  • Steps to diversity in your open source group

    Coraline Ehmke has developed apps for the web for 20 years. In that time, she’s learned a lot about open source culture and what makes a community of contributors tick. At the Great Wide Open conference this year, Coraline gave a talk about diversity in open source.

  • Jenkins User Conference – Boston [Event Report]
  • Review: Open source proxy servers are capable, but a bit rough around the edges

    Providing a common gateway for web services, caching web requests or providing anonymity are some of the ways organizations use proxy servers. Commercial proxy products, especially cloud offerings, are plentiful, but we wondered if open source or free products could provide enterprise-grade proxy services.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS Chromecast-like device leaks online

        Not long after it was revealed that Mozilla was working on adding support for Google’s Chromecast in their mobile iterations of the Firefox browser, it appears that they are also creating a device of their own, with functions similar to the Chromecast. The device, which was created by an unknown hardware manufacturer, looks similar to a Chromecast dongle and runs Firefox OS, according to tweets from Christian Heilmann, a “Mozilla Developer Evangelist“. He describes the device as a “fully open TV casting prototype”, which is pretty much the Chromecast, but more open.

      • Mozilla at Open Source Bridge

        This week Open Source Bridge will kick off in Portland and I’m extremely excited that Mozilla will once again be sponsoring this wonderful event. This will also mark my second year attending.

      • Mozilla develops open-source streaming dongle
      • Mozilla puts a development environment into the browser with WebIDE

        Mozilla cites two major advantages of using WebIDE as compared with developing apps for competing platforms. In-browser development tools are already familiar to the enormous number of Web developers that exist, so using them for application development minimizes the number of new tools and new skills that must be learned.

        Second, they’re extremely lightweight as development tools go. The substantial size of downloading tools such as Xcode or Visual Studio, in addition to the cost of developer licenses on other platforms, can limit their appeal and usability, especially in emerging markets. Putting the tools into the browser means that Mozilla’s reach is near universal.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Codescaling Catchup

      I’ve been doing some work with Eclipse Orion, a web-centric IDE with some interesting attributes, so I was interested to see news of forthcoming language support enhancements coming in Orion 6.0. Lots of interesting bits like syntax highlighting that brings in Arduino files, new documentation generators, the ability to use all the tooling while the JavaScript is embedded in HTML, better tunable JavaScript validation with new rules and so on… worth checking out.

Leftovers

  • Man who wore colander on his head for gun licence photo says it is part of Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s religion

    AN Adelaide man who had his gun licence photo taken with a colander on his head says it is significant to his religion — the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and he should not have had to undertake a psychological test.

  • Hardware

  • Security

    • Syrian Electronic Army hacks Reuters

      Reuters, the international news agency, was reportedly been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army – a hacking group who support the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and attack news organizations.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Prosecutor details 14 killings in Blackwater trial

      In a recitation of death and destruction, a federal prosecutor on Tuesday chronicled for a jury the alleged conduct of four Blackwater security guards accused of killing 14 Iraqis and wounding 18 others in downtown Baghdad nearly seven years ago.

      In opening statements at the trial of the four guards, Assistant U.S. Attorney T. Patrick Martin said some of the victims were “simply trying to get out” of the way of gunfire from Blackwater guards. “Fourteen died, 18 injured. For what?” he said.

    • Fournier: Obama Lies as Bad as Bush

      In a review of a new book by a journalist who claims George Bush lied to the country in the run up to the Iraq war, National Journal columnist Ron Fournier insists that Obama has been just as bad as Bush with his constant stream of lies to the country.

    • Crashes mount as military flies more drones in U.S.

      Shortly after the day’s final bell rang and hundreds of youngsters ran outside Lickdale Elementary School with their book bags and lunchboxes, a military drone fell from the sky.

    • Death at Five Times the Speed of Sound
    • Western intervention in Iraq will be a gift to Isis

      Whether it’s bombs or boots that are sent to stop them, the fallout will provide the militants with dangerously effective propaganda for their cause

    • ‘Stop saying ‘uh-oh’ while you’re flying’: Drone crash pilot quotes unveiled

      Drones are often called unmanned aircraft. But there is a lot of human drama when they crash. Drone pilots and other crew members swear, scream and yell at their remote-control video screens when the aircraft fly out of control. Those moments are often captured by audio recorders in ground control stations.

    • Israeli youngster killed in blast on border with Syria
    • Israel strikes Syrian military targets in retaliation for deadly attack

      The Israeli military struck Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights overnight Sunday in retaliation for an attack earlier in the day that killed an Israeli teen and injured three other people.

      Fighter jets fired missiles at nine targets on the Syrian side of the border, including military command posts and firing positions. An artillery unit that uses high-precision Tamuz missiles was also employed in the strike, the military said in a statement. It confirmed direct hits.

    • Has drone campaign in Pakistan been revived?

      For the first time in nearly six months, U.S. drone strikes hit Pakistan’s tribal region three times in less than a week, killing at least 20 militants with suspected ties to the Haqqani network.

      The hiatus was the longest pause in the controversial CIA program since 2006, and the drones’ sudden return begs the questions: Why now? And is this the beginning of a renewed drone campaign in Pakistan?

    • Iraq and the Persistence of American Hegemony

      With ‘official’ America debating how to respond to what at present appears to be a Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Iraq the question both within and outside of the US is: why do America and the Americans have any say in the matter? The last quarter century of US engagement in Iraq has been a series of military and geopolitical blunders with catastrophic consequences across the Middle East. The answer of course, as it was with the mis-sold invasions of 1990 and 2003, is Operation Iraqi Liberation, oil. The dim hubris of Bush / Cheney / Rumsfeld / Rice that broke ‘Iraq’ into sectarian factions has been met by leading Democrats with claims that the war was ‘mismanaged’ and that Iraq remains of some vaguely specified ‘vital interest.’ The moral, ethical and societal sickness that has US President Obama now sending murder robots (drones) and additional troops to force the will of ‘official’ Washington onto what remains of the national government of Iraq misses that it was this very same will that caused the social / political catastrophe now claimed to be in need of rectification.

    • Shaw details Cleburne links to JFK assassination

      Shaw argues that evidence available, evidence gone missing and discrepancies simply don’t add up to the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that day.

    • FORMER TOP CIA OFFICIAL REVEALS GULEN RELATIONS

      Speaking to the BBC on Friday , former top CIA official, Graham Fuller, admitted that he wrote a reference letter for the Gülen movement leader, Fethullah Gülen, after the FBI resisted granting him permanent residency status between 2006 to 2010.

      The former top official and Middle East expert, yet claimed that there was no relation between the Gülen movement and CIA, during the BBC interview on his newly released book “Turkey and the Arab Spring: Leadership in the Middle East.”

    • UN hears testimony that contradicts Cuban account of dissident’s death

      The United Nations Human Rights Council, currently sitting in Geneva, has heard testimony from leaders of the Venezuela protest movement and from the survivor of the car crash that killed Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá.

      The hearings on human rights in Venezuela and Cuba, was organized by a coalition of NGO’s as an official event inside the Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 17.

    • Iraq, ISIS and intervention: Just what is going on?

      A high Israeli official was quoted recently saying it was Iran’s influence that is most dangerous in the region, not that of ISIS. Of course, that should tell us a great deal. In this part of the world, Israel’s views count for far more than those of all the other countries put together, at least, so far as the United States’ government is concerned, the ridiculous lopsidedness in that reflecting the best Congress campaign funding can buy.

    • Kurds say they warned MI6, CIA about ISIL

      Five months ago, a Kurdish intelligence “asset” walked into a base and said he had information to hand over.

      The capture by jihadists the month before of two Sunni cities in western Iraq was just the beginning, he said. There would soon be a major onslaught on Sunni territories.

    • Britain and US ‘neglected alert to Iraq jihadist takeover’
    • CIA trained ISIL in Jordan: Report

      A new report says the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants were trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Jordan more than two years ago.

    • American Senator: US arming ISIL terrorists

      Senator Rand Paul said the US government has been arming ISIS militants in Syria and funding its allies.

    • Don Obama, Capo di Tutti Capi

      Indeed, Mafia Dons have learned the hard way after RICO not to give clear cut instructions to their operatives. Obama, our Capo Di Tutti Capi, has learned his lesson well. He lets his capos — heads of the IRS, DOJ, CIA, know how to proceed with vague injunctions that set the tone.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • [April] Why US fracking companies are licking their lips over Ukraine

      From climate change to Crimea, the natural gas industry is supreme at exploiting crisis for private gain – what I call the shock doctrine

    • Crude Awakening: 37 years of oil spills in Alberta

      Timelapse: All spills of crude oil crude bitumen and synthetic crude in Alberta each year from 1975-2012. Each dot is one spill; dot size does not indicate spill size. Source: Energy Resources Conservation Board

      Alberta’s had an average of two crude oil spills a day, every day for the past 37 years.

      That makes 28,666 crude oil spills in total, plus another 31,453 spills of just about any other substance you can think of putting in a pipeline – from salt water to liquid petroleum.

  • Finance

    • Tens of thousands march in London against cuts in public and welfare services

      An estimated 50,000 people marched through London, including supporters of Stop the War, CND and other peace groups who called for warfare spending to be cut and not welfare services.

    • Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK

      Slaves forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal.

    • The Pakistani women behind the official FIFA World Cup balls make $182 per year each

      She has no idea who Lionel Messi is and her home country isn’t even playing, but Pakistani mother-of-five Gulshan Bibi can’t wait for the World Cup – because she helped make the balls.

    • It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com

      The NY Times, in It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave, explores the trend of increasing numbers of young people continuing to live with their parents after college.

      The article notes that one in five people in their 20s and early 30s currently lives with parents, and 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from parents. In the prior generation, only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.

      The common explanation for the change is that young people had the misfortune of growing up during several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends.

      Today, almost 45 percent of 25-year-olds, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000, and more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, causing them to make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Dropcam acquired by Google owned Nest

      Dropcam, a San Francisco based home surveillance company has on their official blog post revealed that they have been acquired by Nest. Nest, a Google owned company, confirmed on their blog the acquisition and also the fact that this acquisition will not change anything for either of the companies’ immediate future, as both Nest products as well as the Dropcam products will be available to customers without any change. The deal went down for $555 million.

    • A history of the federal government’s ‘lost’ e-mails

      A watchdog group this week called on Congress to investigate federal record-keeping practices to determine why the government has repeatedly lost e-mails that could shed light on alleged wrongdoing.

    • Mass Surveillance in Britain

      European officials have often acted as though excessive government surveillance was solely an American problem. The recent release of a legal statement from a senior British counterterrorism official, Charles Farr, shows that the United States government is certainly not alone in justifying such practices.

    • The Majority Has Spoken: Email Privacy Reform Possible Right Now

      Yesterday, Reps Reps. Ron Desantis (R-Fla.) and Cedric Richmond (D-La.) became the 217th and 218th members of the House to sign on to the Email Privacy Act. More than half of the 435 members of the House of Representatives now formally support updating the outdated law governing the privacy of our electronic communications and requiring police to get a warrant before they read our emails, look at our online photo albums, or view our texts. Among those 218 members who have endorsed reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) are 136 Republicans – more than half of the members of the majority party.

    • Vulturization: ‘Privacy’ is fightin’ words to cloud touters – they get angry

      Being as these folks stand up OpenStack, I also took the time to find out what it’s like to work with the community and whether it’s really as much of a pain to work with as everyone claims.

    • Snowden’s year in Russia: From airport hideout to mystery location
    • Snowden collects documents to extend asylum on one-year anniversary of stay in Russia
    • A ‘Cool War’?

      With the revelations of Edward Snowden, Beijing has fittingly dismissed the nuanced American distinction. Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has infiltrated into Huawei Technologies, a hi-tech Chinese multinational company. A recent Foreign Policy article confirmed that an elite NSA ultra-secret China hacking group “successfully penetrated” Chinese computers and its telecommunication industry for the past 15 years.

    • Matt Robinson: General public must oversee our overseers

      Take for example a situation happening across the United States, but most recently exemplified in a records request in Florida. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a public records request with a police department in Sarasota, Fla., for information on a surveillance tool called “Stingray,” which is used by law enforcement agencies across the country to mass collect data.

    • Sirota: US government at war with itself over civil liberties
    • Glenn Greenwald expands exposure of privacy violators

      “We’re working on that story now,” said Greenwald, who grew up in New York and lives in Rio de Janeiro with his longtime partner, David Miranda. “It’s highly likely it will be out before the end of the month. It will be reporting on the people the NSA is targeting domestically.”

    • 4 July: Annual Independence FROM America demo at NSA Menwith Hill

      Join the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) at the main entrance to NSA Menwith Hill, HG1 4QZ, on Friday 4 July from 5pm to 9pm for the annual “Independence FROM America” demonstration.

    • PM makes off-the-record visit to NSA

      Prime Minister John Key took a secret trip to the NSA spy agency while he was in Washington last week.

      It is not surprising that he went — he made the same trip the last time he was in Washington in 2011.

      This time, it was left off the published schedule of meetings that is handed out to the news media. Last time, it was declared.

    • US spying: Who do you believe? Snowden or Key?

      The results of a Stuff Ipsos poll released last week shows 71.6 per cent of Kiwis believe United States spy agencies are gathering data on New Zealanders and 61.8 per cent of those people do not support the US being able to do so.

    • Key’s off-the-record visit to controversial spy HQ

      Prime Minister John Key took a secret trip to the NSA spy agency while he was in Washington last week.

      It is not surprising that he went — he made the same trip the last time he was in Washington in 2011.

    • NSA Hurting Millennials’ Way of Life

      Millennials are criticized for broadcasting too many intimate details of our everyday lives online. We readily publish what we had for lunch, when we went to the gym, relationship status updates, and more. Things more senior generations might deem “TMI” are standard online chatter for us; however, there is a method to the madness. Global connectivity has enabled us to open new lines of communication with people across town, across the country, and across the world. We see value in being able to speak freely, giving us access to new ideas and cultures through comparing the human experience, hemisphere to hemisphere.

    • Redeeming NIST’s Reputation

      Bill Would Ban NSA from Undermining NIST Crypto Standards

    • Encrypted Email Service ProtonMail Soars Past $160,000 Campaign Goal
    • Walsh: Federal government has no right to spy on Americans
    • NSA mixing rule of law with cloak-and-dagger spy world – expert
    • US Funds “Terror Studies” to Dissect and Neutralize Social Movements

      The U.S. Department of Defense is immersed in studies about…people like you. The Pentagon wants to know why folks who don’t themselves engage in violence to overthrow the prevailing order become, what the military calls, “supporters of political violence.” And by that they mean, everyone who opposes U.S military policy in the world, or the repressive policies of U.S. allies and proxies, or who opposes the racially repressive U.S. criminal justice system, or who wants to push the One Percent off their economic and political pedestals so they can’t lord it over the rest of us. (I’m sure you recognize yourself somewhere in that list.)

    • ‘Double standards’: Apple implements MAC anti-tracking technique used by Aaron Swartz

      Apple is going to implement random MAC addresses technology in its iOS8 devices, an anonymity-granting technique which late computer prodigy Aaron Swartz was accused of using to carry out his infamous MIT hack.

      Swartz, who faced criminal prosecution on charges of mass downloading academic documents and articles, was also accused of using MAC (Media Access Control) spoofing address technology to gain access to MIT’s subscription database.

    • New Eavesdropping Equipment Sucks All Data Off Your Phone

      In a Capitol Hill hearing room two summers ago, privacy activist Christopher Soghoian organized a stunning demonstration of some new police surveillance technology. A small group of congressional staffers were handed “clean” cellphones and invited to start calling each other while, off to the side, a Berkeley communications researcher named Kurtis Heimerl turned on his gear. After a few minutes, Soghoian told the staffers to hang up—and then Heimerl played back their conversations. Not only that, the two men told the staffers, the digital eavesdropping equipment was capable of sucking all the data from their phones—emails, contact files, music, videos—whatever was on them.

    • Can you spy on a phone when it is turned off?
    • Snowden Gets German Fritz Bauer Award for Exposing US Intelligence

      Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the Fritz Bauer Prize of the German Humanist Union, a prominent civil rights organization, for exposing the controversial surveillance practices of the NSA and its accomplices.

    • Little reform since Snowden spilled the beans

      A year has passed since the American former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden began revealing the massive scope of Internet surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency.

      His disclosures have elicited public outrage and sharp rebukes from close U.S. allies like Germany, upending rosy assumptions about how free and secure the Internet and telecommunications networks really are.

      Single-handedly Snowden has changed how people regard their phones, tablets and laptops, and sparked a public debate about the protection of personal data.

    • More Foreign Governments Provide NSA with Support for Global Data Surveillance

      The National Security Agency’s (NSA) reach of spying on worldwide communications is even broader than previously reported, according to new information leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

      In addition to working with allied spy agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the NSA has partnered with other, unnamed foreign governments to access enormous volumes of emails, phone calls and Internet data.

  • Civil Rights

    • Parliament is sexist, masculine and out of date, say British women

      A poll about attitudes to Westminster on the influential parenting website Mumsnet has revealed startling levels of disillusionment with a male-dominated political system

    • sRepressing World Cup Protests — A Booming Business for Brazil

      On June 12, Brazilian police fired tear gas on a group of 50 unarmed marchers blocking a highway leading to the World Cup arena in São Paulo. On June 15 in Rio de Janeiro another 200 marchers faced floods of tear gas and stun grenades in their approach to Maracana stadium. Armed with an arsenal of less lethal weapons and employing tactics imported from U.S. SWAT teams in the early 2000s, police clad in riot gear are deploying forceful tactics, wielding batons and releasing chemical agents at close range. In Brazil, this style of protest policing is not only a common form of political control, but also a booming business.

    • Total US Tab Tops $5.2 Billion For Guantanamo Prison

      The cost for this year, $454.1 million to operate, staff and build at the prison complex, comes from a report by the Defense Department’s Office of the Comptroller.

    • The USS Guantanamo

      No way, no how will President Obama send a terrorist to Guantanamo Bay. But how about a few weeks on a Navy warship to chat with U.S. interrogators without a Miranda warning? Welcome aboard the President’s floating not-so-secret prison.

    • Iraqis Are Not ‘Abstractions’

      When I saw the Washington Post’s banner headline, “U.S. sees risk in Iraq airstrikes,” I thought, “doesn’t that say it all.” The Post apparently didn’t deem it newsworthy to publish a story headlined: “Iraqis see risk in U.S. airstrikes.” Then, in an accompanying article, authors Gregg Jaffe and Kevin Maurer observed nonchalantly that “Iraq and the Iraqi people remain something of an abstraction,” a point that drove me to distraction.

    • Iraq’s Next PM? Ahmed Chalabi, Chief Peddler of False WMDs, Meets US Officials as Maliki Falters

      Pressure is mounting on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to form a less sectarian government or to resign. A representative of the influential Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called for the creation of what he described as a new “effective” government. On Thursday, The New York Times revealed the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, Robert Beecroft, and the State Department’s top official in Iraq, Brett McGurk, recently met with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who has been described as a potential candidate to replace al-Maliki. Chalabi is the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, a CIA-funded Iraqi exile group that strongly pushed for the 2003 U.S. invasion. The INC helped drum up pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. The group provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration, U.S. lawmakers and journalists. We are joined by Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine.

    • New Hollywood assassination film raises hackles in North Korea

      The Interview, a new action comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, has elicited choice comments from North Korea for showing the “desperation” of American society. Due out in October, the film tells the tale of two US journalists who are given the opportunity to interview North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.

    • Rekindle ties with Arab League, Rogers says

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