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03.22.13

Links 22/3/2013: Chinese Government Chooses GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • M$ Bars Itself From New Industry

  • Science

    • Celebrated Scientist Renounces National Academy and War

      Last month, University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences to protest the election to the group of Napoleon Chagnon, a peer whose specious arguments in favor of a natural human tendency toward violence have helped militarize the discipline and legitimize wars of aggression.

    • CHINA IS ENGINEERING GENIUS BABIES

      It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project.

  • Security

    • United States v. Auernheimer, and Why I Am Representing Auernheimer Pro Bono on Appeal Before the Third Circuit

      On Monday, Andrew Auernheimer was sentenced to serve 41 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Auernheimer’s case has received a lot of press attention, and I think that attention is merited: I think the case against Auernheimer is deeply flawed, and that the principles the case raises are critically important for civil liberties online. For that reason, I have agreed to represent Auernheimer pro bono in his appeal before the Third Circuit. (I will be joined by the trial counsel Tor Ekeland and his colleagues Nace Naumoski and Mark Jaffe, together with Marcia Hofmann and Hanni Fakhoury of EFF.) In this post, I want to explain some of the issues in play in this case that I think make it so important.

    • Yet Another Reason Not To Use That Other OS

      Some people figure they must have that other OS on their PC even if they have a mess of servers. There’s evidence of malware for that other OS that targets GNU/Linux machines and wipes them…
      “The dropper for Trojan.Jokra contains a module for wiping remote Linux machines. We do not normally see components that work on multiple operating systems, so it is interesting to discover that the attackers included a component to wipe Linux machines inside a Windows threat.”

    • A Letter to Paul Wolfowitz

      Twenty years ago, you became dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and hired me as a minor staff functionary. I never thanked you properly. I needed that job. Included in the benefits package was the chance to hobnob with luminaries who gathered at SAIS every few weeks to join Zbigniew Brzezinski for an off-the-record discussion of foreign policy. From five years of listening to these insiders pontificate, I drew one conclusion: people said to be smart — the ones with fancy résumés who get their op-eds published in the New York Times and appear on TV — really aren’t. They excel mostly in recycling bromides. When it came to sustenance, the sandwiches were superior to the chitchat.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Washington Post Prints Iraq Lies, 2013 Edition
    • Statutes of Limitations Are Expiring on Some Bush Crimes
    • Time’s Rethink on Drones

      Crowley argues that “in political terms, it’s getting hard to tell the difference” between Obama and Dick Cheney. In the last few months, “his drone war has turned from asset to headache,” thanks to dogged criticism from human rights groups, international lawyers and a few politicians, including Republican Sen. Rand Paul.

      Crowley writes that the program “is increasingly straining against its legal authority” and that “a big practical problem with the drone war is that the rest of the world hates it.” He runs through various ideas that could introduce accountability or new legal mechanisms to constrain or refine the program–or “it might seem easier to simply wind down the drone war entirely.”

    • Ten Years After the Invasion of Iraq, Are We Any Closer to Peace?
    • Pepper Spray Torture–in the USA

      Amazing story today out of Maine, where the Portland daily paper has published an account of a prisoner being pepper-sprayed by prison staffers in June 2012–despite already being restrained in a chair. And: They have the two-hour video to prove it. And: They have posted the entire video on their site. Now the law wants to find out how they got the leak

    • Maine officials seeking pepper-spray video leak

      The Maine Department of Corrections is investigating to determine how the press obtained video and documents about a captain’s treatment of an inmate last year.

      [...]

      James Mackie, spokesman for the union that represents corrections officers, said he is not surprised that the department is investigating.

      “The number of investigations since (Ponte) has taken over have just increased exponentially,” he said.

      Mackie said he was surprised that the incident, which happened on June 10, took so long to come to light. Welch was disciplined in August and September.

      “We were all aware of the issue at MCC. There was no way it was going to be kept secret,” Mackie said.

      Breton said she does not know whether investigations have increased under Ponte.

      The newspaper’s story and the accompanying video offered a rare glimpse inside the prison and into a confrontation between officers and a medicated, mentally ill inmate.

      Paul Schlosser had received hospital treatment for a gouge he inflicted on his left arm, but had repeatedly removed the dressing in an effort to get medication and a book to distract him.

      Inmates who hurt themselves to manipulate staff are among the most difficult to deal with, Ponte said last week.

    • DYING VET’S ‘FUCK YOU’ LETTER TO GEORGE BUSH & DICK CHENEY NEEDS TO BE READ BY EVERY AMERICAN

      I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

    • RepeatingHistory.org

      The NDAA and the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans

    • The New York Times and “Liberal Media” Helped Sell the Iraq War

      Michael Ratner: The NYT and other “liberal” commentators led the way in selling the WMD myth and justified the Iraq war; their mea culpas ring hollow.

    • CIA ‘to lose control of drone programme to Pentagon’

      John Brennan, the new CIA director and architect of Mr Obama’s expanded “targeted killing” campaign, is believed to be preparing to transfer more control of the programme to the Pentagon.

    • Obama rumored to shift CIA drone program to military
    • Little Will Change If the Military Takes Over CIA’s Drone Strikes
    • CIA Chief Tech Officer: Big Data Is The Future And We Own It
    • CIA’s Tech Head on Your Data: ‘We Try To Collect Everything And Hang On To It Forever’
    • CIA CTO: We want your data and will keep it forever
    • CIA and FBI Counter-Terrorism Officials: Cheney Lied About 9/11 Hijacker

      Mark Rossini, was then an FBI counter-terrorism agent detailed to the CIA. He was assigned the task of evaluating a Czech intelligence report that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attack on the World Trade Towers.

    • Three CIA officials declared Pos

      The three CIA officials, Assistant Sub-Inspector Shakeel Ahmed Butt, Constables Muhammad Ahsan and Mahboob Elahi, are accused of custodial killing of a father of seven, Niamat, by third degree torture.

    • Towards the Globalization of CIA Torture and Rendition

      There is enormous diversity among the countries involved. They include Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and Jordan, which carried out the torture on suspects that the CIA rendered to them. Poland, Lithuania, Romania and Thailand hosted secret prisons operated by the CIA where detainees could be held clandestinely and have interrogations or torture conducted directly by American intelligence operatives.

      European nations such as Macedonia, Georgia, and Sweden detained and delivered suspects to the CIA to be tortured. Larger countries such as Britain or Germany conducted some of the interrogations themselves while smaller countries such as Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, or Greece provided intelligence, logistical support, use of airspace, etc.

    • US drones kill four in Pakistan: officials

      US drones fired two missiles at a vehicle in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt Thursday, killing four militants, security officials said.

    • Rep. Mike Rogers: No Americans are on drone ‘kill list’

      Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) told the National Journal on Wednesday that no Americans were currently on President Barack Obama’s so-called “kill list.”

      Rogers said as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he reviews every drone strike on a suspected terrorist after it has been conducted. Though no Americans are currently being targeted overseas, the Republican congressmen described how that situation could change.

    • 400 civilians killed by US drones in Pakistan

      In evidence to Ben Emmerson QC, UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism, the Foreign Ministry has said that the US drones have killed at least 2,200 people in the country, including at least 400 civilians. This is close to the bureau’s low range estimate of 411.

    • Drone Murder: War Crime or Superpower perogative
    • U.S. policy of death by drones is cloaked in subterfuge (Commentary)
    • U.S. drone policy killing hundreds of innocents, Obama says it’s okay

  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks Was Just a Preview: We’re Headed for an Even Bigger Showdown Over Secrets

      I’ll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we’re headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.

      We’ve seen the battle lines forming for years now. It’s increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

      This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially the real subject of Gibney’s film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.

    • NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake: All Doubts Dispelled, Bradley Manning’s a Whistleblower
    • Throwing Manning to the Wolves

      In media mythology, the years from the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s were the classical age, a heroic time of moral clarity.

      Mainstream journalism marinated in adversarialism. Little Southern newspapers infuriated their own readers by staring down segregation. Foreign correspondents forced upon an unwilling public the realities of a brutal war. Network news ignored official disdain and showed the bottomless suffering the war inflicted on the innocents it was supposed to save. With the Pentagon Papers, newspapers defied secrecy rules to expose government lies. With Watergate, reporters forced out a corrupt president.

    • Update 3/20/13: Rolling Stone magazine features major Bradley Manning story
    • WikiLeaks: Disappearances, Nishantha Gajanayake And Exclusive Photographs
    • Manning (WikiLeaks) ‘cablegate’ Trial reveals U.S. brutality in anti-terror war

      That’s what the US Marine Bradley Manning said on Thursday, March 01 in military court at Fort Meade, Maryland. He pled guilty to unauthorized possession of certain information, to willfully communicating that information to an unauthorized person, WikiLeaks, and that the conduct was “service discrediting” or prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the military.

  • Finance

    • Europe: Protests hit austerity

      When European Union leaders gathered at their economic summit meeting in Brussels, they were confronted by thousands of protesters who denounced them and their austerity policies. Working people and labor union representatives from all over Europe demonstrated at the European Commission and Council headquarters on March 14.

      At least 10,000 demonstrators denounced the “Troika” — the International Mone tary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission — which has imposed draconian cuts in jobs, wages, benefits and public services in several southern eurozone countries as conditions for loans. Protesters demanded that the Troika stop all austerity plans, provide jobs and end the crises their policies have created.

    • US Begins Regulating BitCoin, Will Apply “Money Laundering” Rules To Virtual Transactions

      Last November, in an act of sheer monetary desperation, the ECB issued an exhaustive, and quite ridiculous, pamphlet titled “Virtual Currency Schemes” in which it mocked and warned about the “ponziness” of such electronic currencies as BitCoin. Why a central bank would stoop so “low” to even acknowledge what no “self-respecting” (sic) PhD-clad economist would even discuss, drunk and slurring, at cocktail parties, remains a mystery to this day. However, that it did so over fears the official artificial currency of the insolvent continent, the EUR, may be becoming even more “ponzi” than the BitCoins the ECB was warning about, was clear to everyone involved who saw right through the cheap propaganda attempt. Feel free to ask any Cypriot if they would now rather have their money in locked up Euros, or in “ponzi” yet freely transferable, unregulated BitCoins.

    • Is Cyprus in Our Future?

      The economic news this week highlights what happens when governments are unable to confront the root cause of the financial collapse – the risky speculation and securities fraud of the big banks. What happens? They blame the people, cut their benefits, tax their savings and demand they work harder for less money.

    • Cyprus – Is this the next phase in austerity – naked theft?
    • The Miracle Product That Cures Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome!

      During last year’s presidential election, Dr. Willard M. Romney diagnosed a previously unrecognized epidemic illness that is eating away at the moral foundations of our country. Romney was the first medical scientist to grasp that 47% of our citizens have been transformed into an army of zombie parasites now known to the experts as “moochers.” The moochers have been infected with DES, Degenerative Entitlement Syndrome, a 21st century plague whose victims live lives solely devoted to sucking funds from the bank accounts of decent people. Not one to sit idly by while an invasive undead horde saps and impurifies our precious bodily fluids, Dr. Romney attempted to sound the national alarm about the moocher scourge. But alas, he was ahead of his time. The country was not yet ready to hear his bracing but prescient DES warning.

      Moochers might appear normal, but don’t be fooled by appearances! While these bloodsuckers are seemingly busy changing bedpans, waxing the floor at your office, serving up stacks of pancakes at Denny’s and standing in long lines to beg abjectly for “jobs’, they are all the while draining our hard-won and well-merited wealth. A tell-tale symptom of DES is that while moochers pay all kinds of sales taxes, payroll taxes and government fees just like the rest of us, they don’t pay any income taxes. Imagine! No income taxes! The DES sufferer will tell you that the absence of income tax obligations is somehow related to the moocher’s extreme deficiency in actual income. A likely story!

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How to Read Stories About Israel in the NY Times (Hint: Very Carefully)

      So is the Times, in its own way, telling us not to trust the officials speaking on the record? That’s certainly one way to read the piece.

      Elsewhere in the paper we learn that part of Barack Obama’s visit to Israel includes a look at the country’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system, which is funded by the U.S. government.

    • Accidental Email Exposes Trolls of Governing Party in Spain
    • Machine Guns on the Vegas Strip? In Nevada, ALEC/NRA Bill Introduced to Stop Cities from Banning Machine Guns

      A Nevada politician has introduced a bill that would bar the city of Las Vegas from enacting tougher gun laws than the state as a whole, including language that would specifically protect “machine guns” from being barred on the Las Vegas strip if the state did not bar machine guns across the state. At the last known meeting of the “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association proposed amendments to the ALEC “Consistency in Firearms Regulation Act” to add “machine guns” to ALEC’s model bill prohibiting local governments from adopting different rules for guns and ammo than a state has as a whole. On March 18, a Nevada state legislator introduced a bill in the statehouse that is almost a word-for-word copy from that ALEC bill, which ALEC has since attempted to distance itself from while doing nothing to stop or repeal such bills.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and The National Security State
    • CIA’s Gus Hunt On Big Data: We ‘Try To Collect Everything And Hang On To It Forever’

      The CIA’s chief technology officer outlined the agency’s endless appetite for data in a far-ranging speech on Wednesday.

      Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos — and that the agency wants all of it.

      “The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” Hunt said. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”

    • Formerly Top Secret NSA Cryptologs From 1974-1997
    • Venezuela: ‘Destabilizing’ Twitter User Ortega Released

      UPDATE: Lourdes Alicia Ortega Perez, the Venezuelan woman who was arrested last week after mocking Hugo Chavez on Twitter, was released from police custody on March 16. Ortega was taken to court on charges of spreading false information and committing fraud. She has since been granted her freedom [es], but will be required to appear before the court every 30 days.

    • The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Is Asking Questions About Guantánamo the US Cannot Answer

      Recent accounts from Guantánamo paint a more chilling picture still: since February 6, 2013, the prisoners have been engaged in a peaceful, mass hunger-strike to protest deteriorating camp conditions and religious provocations by Guantánamo staff, including offensive searches of the prisoners’ Qur’ans. Ghaleb al-Bihani, a severe diabetic, is among the scores of men hunger-striking. He spoke to his lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights recently and explained that he has lost more than 20 pounds in a matter of weeks. His blood-sugar levels are fluctuating so wildly that Guantánamo physicians have told him they fear for his life. Other prisoners have lost consciousness; some are reportedly coughing up blood. This is to say nothing of the less visible, but equally grave health risks produced by years of indefinite detention. As Physicians for Human Rights explained to the IACHR, arbitrary, indefinite detention creates existential uncertainty that can destroy the body and mind. It can even be lethal. The story of Adnan Latif, the most recent prisoner to die at Guantánamo, is a heart-breaking reminder of this.

    • German government drops attempt to ban far-right party
    • Leveson Collateral Damage
    • Urban Exploration Helps Terrorism, Counterterrorism Agency Warns
    • The persecution of Barrett Brown – and how to fight it

      The journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism

  • DRM

    • Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards
    • DRM dispute around HTML5

      A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: “We’re not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house.”

    • Tell W3C: We don’t want the Hollyweb

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Why TAFTA Matters, and What We Should Do About It

      Back in January, I wrote about what I called the “Trans-Atlantic Partnership Agreement”, by analogy with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, TPP, whose negotiations have already dragged on for several years. The formal announcement of what is now variously called the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) or Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), took place just over a month ago, but already Mexico has stated that it wishes to join, and there are rumours Canada might tag along too.

      This would then turn the EU-US agreement into a EU-NAFTA agreement – that is between the EU and the whole North American Free Trade Agreement area. If that happens, it’s quite possible that South American countries will start trying to join too, for fear of being “left out” (although they might do better to consider whether being in is actually better for them, given their limited ability to influence the negotiations between the two main partners.)

    • Transatlantic Civil Society Declaration: Leave Copyright and Patent Provisions Out of TAFTA

      Last month, U.S. President Barack Obama announced the launch of a new trade deal between the United States and the European Union. This transatlantic free trade agreement (TAFTA)—or what government leaders are touting as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—is likely to carry copyright provisions that would pose a serious threat to digital rights. Past and currently negotiated trade agreements have enacted rules that would force ISPs to turn into copyright police, place harsh and disproportionate criminal penalties on file sharers, and seriously impair users’ ability to innovate and access content on the Internet.

    • Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Motion Picture Association: The Cloud Is A Threat To Us And The Best Response Is Censorship

        The Motion Picture Association is somewhat notorious for flipping out over every new technology and how it will, without doubt, mean death for them. Most famously, of course, the prediction that the VCR would be the “Boston Strangler” to the movie industry a mere six years before home video revenues outstripped box office revenues. However, this seems to be somewhat instinctual behavior. Everything new must automatically be classified as a threat, and the best response is to kill it outright. The latest version of this appears to be the threat of (gasp!) “cloud computing.” At a get together in Hong Kong, in which the movie industry was supposed to be talking about “protecting the screen community in the cloud era” apparently there was the typical predictions of doom with little in the way of suggestions. But there were some.

      • Copyright Chief Urges Congress to Produce ‘Next Great Copyright Act’

        Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante told a House congressional subcommittee Wednesday that everything from anticircumvention provisions and fair use to length of copyright and performance royalties should be on the table.

      • European Court: Pirate Bay co-founders lose free speech bid in Strasbourg

        Last week, the European Court of Human Rights (European Court) rejected the complaint of the ‘The Pirate Bay’ (‘TPB’) co-founders against their criminal conviction for facilitating copyright infringement. ARTICLE 19 is concerned at the Court’s apparent reluctance to become the next battleground for advancing the right to freedom of expression against copyright claims.

      • UK ISPs Start Blocking KickassTorrents, H33T and Fenopy
      • Fresh Calls to Congress to Make Movie and Music Streaming a Felony
      • Brazil’s music collecting societies convicted of forming an illegal cartel

        The Competition Authority in Brazil (CADE) convicted om March 20th the country’s six major collecting societies and their central office (ECAD) – responsible for the collection of music royalties for public performance in Brazil – of formation of cartel and abuse of dominant position in fixing prices. According CADE, the Ecad and its associations not only organized to abusively fix prices, but also created barriers of entry for new associations to join the entity.

      • Leaked! MPAA Talking Points On Copyright Reform: Copyright Is Awesome For Everyone!

        With the possibility of comprehensive copyright reform in the US in the air, we warned that lobbyists from all sides were about to be very, very busy on Capitol Hill, and it has already begun. We’ve heard from very reliable sources that the MPAA has basically been blanketing Congress with the attached document, visiting as many offices as possible and leaving it behind as their talking points on why copyright is just freaking awesome.

      • Ebook pirates highjack the name of anti piracy campaign

Grooming Microsoft as the Voice of Free/Open Source Software

Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Staging a connection

Groom and bride

Summary: Shameless, dangerous hijacking of the voice of Free/open source software by Microsoft and its notable proxies

Mac Asay, who had applied to work for Microsoft, was too soft on the company amid the latest openwashing attempts. There seems to be a big campaign right now to make Microsoft seem like an open source player, with Microsoft allies doing a lot of the work.Microsoft Gavin promotes and grooms Miguel de Icaza this week and Microsoft’s mole in FOSS, Mr. Walli [1, 2, 3], calls FOSS freeloaders in this new article. Yes, freebies is how Microsoft wants us to perceive Open Source, as if freedom is all down the trash along with the GPL and the FSF. There is something called “Future of Open Source Survey”, which is being promoted right now without revealing the Microsoft connection. Black Duck is pushing around this stuff in social networks (using its corporate account). It is a recipe for trouble. The openwashing of Azure, as seen here, may be the reason, or one among several. Black Duck, which is openwashing its partner Microsoft, is behind some of it and here it is interjecting itself into the press. It says: “Perhaps no one knows this better than Dave Gruber, Black Duck Software’s Director of Developer Programs. Black Duck is a software management and consulting firm. The company does not specifically market its own open source product line. Instead, it focuses on helping software developers build better software faster through open source.”

No, it is exploiting FOSS, patenting software, and taking away other people’s word (Palamida for instance) while openeashing partners like Microsoft. Black Duck is scooping up data analytics and forums related to FOSS to speak on everyone’s behalf and form a pseudo-authority. No wonder Black Duck was founded by a former “Evangelist” of Microsoft, a euphemism for AstroTurfer.

The “Open Source Think Tank” too is Black Duck-controlled and Red Hat makes a mistake by participating. Here are some older posts about the Open Source Think Tank:

Microsoft’s Gianugo Rabellino, in the mean time, finds a way to promote his new paymaster’s agenda by openwashing in ZDNet with this:

  • Higher mobile penetration a call for greater interoperability

    SINGAPORE–The pervasiveness of multiple device ownership has made mobile a key area to further the open source and open standards momentum, and one project Microsoft Open Technologies is driving is the introducing specifications related to enabling Web pages on any browser to understand different inputs such as touch-based movements.

What utter nonsense. This has nothing go do with open source, it’s just called Open Technologies and it brings code into Microsoft’s proprietary stack. Microsoft does not invite FOSS developers, it invoices them.

Resist Microsoft’s abduction of the Open Source message or see the term dying, even in governments which claim to adopt open source software. █

Bill Gates Promotes Junk Food for Profit, Pretends to Fight Hunger (With Patent Maximalism)

Posted in Bill Gates, Patents at 9:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Coca-Cola “successfully pursued water privatization” (see killercoke.org)

Red can

Summary: Petrol, Coke and burger/fries investments without all that ‘pesky’ federal tax; or, how Gates became far richer last year despite financial meltdown and so-called ‘giving pledge’

The Gates Foundation has had Bill Gates pushing his patent crusades under the guise of charity. It’s privatisation of nature’s food resources with marketing propaganda, usually patents disguised as “helping feed the hungry”. The food monopolies, turning nature (public) into “intellectual property” (private), are a subject we addressed here many times before. Here is some Gates marketing that neglects to name the patents for a reason. It would not be golden marketing if people knew that some people get rich in the process. Dr. Glyn Moody says “translation: ripe for patents” when he links to the article “Bill Gates: Food Is Ripe for Innovation”. He is right about the motives, it is about patent monopolies. It is not just GMO anymore.

Mr. Gates now invests (for profit, of course) in Exxon Mobil, Wal-Mart, and Caterpillar. So much for charity, eh? See this new article for more such examples. This other article names Coca-Cola, Caterpillar, and McDonald’s. The business of the foundation (it’s a business, but “charity” disguise gives tax exemptions) is investment. To quote Forbes: “Bill Gates Foundation buys Coca-Cola Co, Procter & Gamble Co, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Willis Group Holdings PLC, Signet Jewelers Ltd, Autoliv, Inc., Orbotech, Ltd., sells Costco Wholesale Corporation, CSX Corp, Expeditors International of Washington, Inc., Cemex, S.A.B. de C.V., Comcast Corp, The Greater China Fund, Inc. during the 3-months ended 12/31/2012, according to the most recent filings of his investment company, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. As of 12/31/2012, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust owns 26 stocks with a total value of $16.8 billion. These are the details of the buys and sells.”

“It’s all about PR, branding, and mind control.”Is this charity? It is worth noting that Melinda Gates becomes a Huffington Post writer after the scandal which threw her out of the trend-setting media. Melinda, as usual, is pretending to be the world’s parent (she and her husband belittle all except themselves and their authority in a God complex/megalomaniac fashion) with articles like this one. No comment needed.

How does Gates feel about promoting and advancing the agenda of the companies which do exactly the opposite of what he claims to be his “causes”? Like companies that cause polio, promote tobacco, advance wars, reduce populations, cause starvation, reduce the reach of education, poison human/animal organs, and so on? We gave a lot of examples before. People ought to develop sceptical skills and recognise that Gates has been buying the big media for over a decade, making it almost unthinkable to say — let alone believe — that he does the opposite of what he claims to do. Ethics are not profitable. In order to grow his wealth, which he still does, Gates needs to do one thing while pretending to do another. Nothing is more bothersome than mass deception of the public, especially with media complicity. That’s how rogue political parties come to power and how third-world nations get lured into modern-age inhumane labour or bondage slavery. It ought to be noted that Coca-Cola, a hugely unethical company (see killercoke.org), is often cited (by name!) by Bill and Melinda as the thing they strive to mimic. It’s all about PR, branding, and mind control. Physically, it’s all water, sugar, caramel, and some chemicals inside glass, plastic, or aluminum. Hypnosis of association — assimilating a soda drink to sex and popularity — is truly an art form. Gates does not stand for poverty, he causes poverty and he is very comfortable in his plutocrats’ circle. █

More Propaganda Films From Bill Gates Target ‘Education’ While His Education Lobby Expands to the United Kingdom

Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Europe, Microsoft at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Imperialism the other way around

Old Union Jack

Summary: Bill Gates is trying to abduct and privatise the system which indoctrinates the public not just in the United States but also in other countries

The sad thing about US policy is, it often spreads to other countries sooner or later. This is especially true when it comes to the copyright industry. Concerns about Gates’ abduction of US education policy is that it may, in turn, spread to other countries. Some years ago we saw Gates expanding its lobbying apparatus, the Gates Foundation, to the UK. Now we learn that the “UK to house a new national education center.” It is Gates- and Hewlett-controlled, just like in the US where the Murdochs, Rockefellers, Broads, Waltons etc. seek to privatise and control children by their minds (schools). Here is a new report:

The National Center for Innovation in Education will be funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and UK, according to a UK news release.

The Gates family has not been hiding its vision and agenda for schools. This is a cumulatively multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for profit and control over minds of future adulls. Consider what we wrote in posts such as those found in the Gates Foundation wiki page .

There is more of the same going on this year. Gates is lobbying to change teaching methods (Gates himself never graduated from college or taught) and he is lobbying by funding generation of data supportive of his agenda. He is seeding awards to promote agenda, using money to control behaviour and policy. As one article put if: “The goal is to better align the district’s budget with agreed-upon goals for reform. ”

With strings attached then, eh? The Washington Examiner has this new article on the subject and it says:

Education watchdogs are raising concerns over the Gates Foundation’s involvement in shaping public education policy, saying the private foundation’s influence in public education policy interferes with the democratic process and local input.

Watch some nasty characters trying to label those who say the obvious “conspiracy therorists” and mind the comments. Even academics are now being insulted by Gates’ minions. Remember that Gates is funding blogs, too, as long as they promote his agenda in education. Here is Gates funding and running conferences with agenda, working to give funds selectively, etc. “Of the 316 scholarships awarded,” says this article, “more than a third — 111 — went to students at Friendship Collegiate Public Charter School, Dan Cronin, a spokesman for Friendship Public Charter Schools, announced Monday.”

Charter school, eh? Sometimes Gates is giving loans — not donations — with lobbying strings attached, as shown here.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, another propaganda firm is coming to assist Gates’ lobbying in education, including Microsoft agenda:

“‘Someday, and that day may never come,’ Don Corleone says famously in The Godfather, ‘I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.’ Back in 2010, filmmaker Lesley Chilcott produced Waiting for ‘Superman’, a controversial documentary that analyzed the failures of the American public education system, and presented charter schools as a glimmer of hope, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-backed KIPP Los Angeles Prep. Gates himself was a ‘Superman’ cast member, lamenting how U.S. public schools are producing ‘American Idiots’ of no use to high tech firms like Microsoft, forcing them to ‘go half-way around the world to recruit the engineers and programmers they needed.’ So some found it strange that when Chilcott teamed up with Gates again three years later to make Code.org’s documentary short What Most Schools Don’t Teach, kids from KIPP Empower Academy were called upon to demonstrate that U.S. schoolchildren are still clueless about what computer programmers do. In a nice coincidence, the film went viral just as leaders of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook pressed President Obama and Congress on immigration reform, citing a dearth of U.S. programming talent. And speaking of coincidences, the lone teacher in the Code.org film (James, Teacher@Mount View Elementary), whose classroom was tapped by Code.org as a model for the nation’s schools, is Seattle teacher Jamie Ewing, who took top honors in Microsoft’s Partners in Learning (PiL) U.S. Forum last summer, earning him a spot on PiL’s ‘Team USA’ and the chance to showcase his project at the Microsoft PiL Global Forum in Prague in November (82-page Conference Guide). Ironically, had Ewing stuck to teaching the kids Scratch programming, as he’s shown doing in the Code.org documentary, Microsoft wouldn’t have seen fit to send him to its blowout at ‘absolutely amazingly beautiful’ Prague Castle. Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft’s rules, ‘must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.’ Fortunately, Ewing’s project — described in his MSDN guest blog post — called for using PowerPoint and Skype. For the curious, here’s Microsoft PiL’s vision of what a classroom should be.”

It says: “Innovative teaching, at least according to Microsoft’s rules, ‘must include the use of one or more Microsoft technologies.’”

Quite telling, eh? And this is the type of people we want controlling UK education? After we got rid of BECTA? Napoleon got exiled after his megalomania caused much stress to France. Maybe we should take a lesson from that. █

After Microsoft Corruption Bill Gates Buys the Press to Whitewash and Deflect

Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Paying the national media, manufacturing a false image

Microsoft BBC

Summary: Amid Microsoft scandals (past and present) we continue to see Microsoft’s cofounder and largest shareholder shaping the big media by paying it to publish puff pieces

Microsoft’s legacy of corruption, which goes on to this date (lots about it in the news this week), will never be fully realised because everything is happening behind closed doors. Someone from Cyprus told me:

They should also check for briberies in Cyprus. The Papadopoulos administration signed a “Memorandum of cooperation” with Microsoft. During Christofias administration, Microsoft was a sponsor of the Cypriot Presidency in Europe. And the best of all; the current President Anastasiades has appointed Lakkotrypis, the Public Sector Director of Microsoft Cyprus official as Minister of Commerce and Energy.

http://cy.linkedin.com/pub/george-lakkotrypis/15/242/625 http://www.mcit.gov.cy/mcit/mcit.nsf/dmlmessageen/dmlmessageen?OpenDocument

We wrote about Microsoft’s history of documented bribes the other day. It’s not a single incident; far from it. A lot of newspeak names bribery ‘incentives’, ‘contributions’, donations’ etc. Bill Gates, for example, is bribing the press for puff pieces through the Gates Foundation. This man whose brand is “Gates” got $7 billion richer last year, trying to brand himself as poor or “for the poor”. It is all about marketing and branding of his name. He wants people to forget where he came from and what he did. Here is an example of the Gates-funded NPR posting a puff piece and the BBC, also funded by Gates (more than once) promoting Gates’ agenda. A few years ago Gates was bribing The Guardian and he still does based on the advertisements/paid endorsements appearing at the top of articles like this about a dictator (notice the “Poverty matters” euphemism).

My criticism of Gates’ hidden agenda are mostly posted in sites like Identica and Twitter, but there is some stuff which merits more attentions and requires more characters. Here is a new articles titled “Humanitarian Imperialism: Charity for Power”. Gates is covered in it:

Mr. Bloomberg has recast himself as a do-gooder despite his origin as a cut-throat Wall Street investment banker and partner at Solomon Brothers. Likewise, Mr. Gates has metamorphosed into a saint, although his fortune originates from a corporation (Microsoft) that has been accused of unfair monopoly practices for bundling its operating system together with its own programs for browsers, etc. Such transformations of the wealthy are facilitated by news agencies like National Public Radio (NPR) that enjoy their donations. They enthusiastically promote, for example, the message that the world must urgently eradicate polio. Bill Gates himself has labeled polio the “world’s biggest problem.” But is it? Back in 2001, there were only 496 cases of polio in the entire world and the disease was disappearing on its own from improved nutrition and availability of clean water. In principle, the decline to zero should have been accelerated by a public-health effort. In practice, however, since the start of the Gate Foundation’s more than $8 B eradication project, to which Mr. Bloomberg recently added $100 M, the polio cases have not even been halved. In 2012, India was held up as a great success because its cases of polio dropped to zero from being half the world’s total. The price for this, however, appears to have been over 47,500 cases in 2011 alone of an infectious disease, with polio’s symptoms but twice the lethality, labeled “non-polio acute flaccid paralysis” (NPAFP). The incidence of NPAFP is directly related to the number of oral polio vaccine (OPV) doses a person receives.

The vaccine opposition is being polluted by many extremists whose role seems to be demonising those whose concerns are sometimes informed and legitimate. But the matter of fact is, Gates seeks to hoard credit for the collective fight many wage against diseases. And policy-setting is the next big adventure for him, having used crime to become wealthy. Money and power are not mutually exclusive. █

Philips Behind Intertrust, Patent Aggressor

Posted in Patents at 8:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Sisvel not the only proxy for the likes of Philips

Earphone

Summary: Another case of litigation by proxy shows why patent trolls are far from the only problem

Several years ago we chastised Philips for sending proxies to aggressively ‘pursue’ companies using patents and armed thugs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]. Nokia patents were even passed to these proxies after Microsoft occupation. (Disclosure: my brother works at Philips Healthcare.) This shows that patents themselves — not just trolls or proxies — are the issue. Titles of article or panels that says “abusive patent litigation” imply there is non-abusive patent litigation (like “good” software patents). I am reminded of the late Zinn who said, how can there be a war on terrorism when war is terrorism?

Anyway, we must not single out just trolls, ignoring abusers like Apple and trying to portray those massive corporations which control the government as the victims. Corporate lawyers won't make a good difference in the patent system.

Intertrust, which we wrote about before (even years ago), is suing Apple right now (as noted briefly the other day). The Economic Times says:

Intertrust Technologies Corp, a software firm owned by a group that includes Sony Corp and Royal Philips Electronics, said on Wednesday it has sued Apple Inc for infringing 15 patents relating to security.

The BBC also named the entities behind Intertrust:

A Silicon Valley-based software firm, Intertrust Technologies, claims Apple’s entire product line infringes security-related patents.

It is suing over the alleged violation of 15 patents, on products including iPhones, iPads, Mac computers, iTunes and App Store.

Intertrust is partly owned by Sony and Philips, and develops security software for digital content.

Some name Sony and Phillips in the headline. This is not to be overlooked. Philips is rapidly shrinking these days in order to increase profits; patent aggression is to be expected. █

Richard Stallman’s Views on Hacktivism and Online Protest

Posted in Audio/Video, FSF at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: New audio recording from Swapnil Bhartiya, the last of this early series by Muktware


Microsoft Surveillance of Over 100,000 Skype Accounts?

Posted in Microsoft at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Watching and listening to perceived ‘enemies’

Binoculars

Summary: Some new numbers reveal the degree to which Skype surveillance has increased since leaving Luxembourg; Europe finds privacy violations in Microsoft

Microsoft has tried to catch up with Google on some transparency and based on numbers from Microsoft, in 2012 Microsoft and Skype got a total of 75,378 law enforcement requests, potentially impacting 137,424 accounts. US laws mean that Microsoft needed to comply. Skype, originally a European product, is in US hands now, through Microsoft.

Microsoft offers no privacy and the Microsoft booster says that US law enforcement is the biggest recipient of Microsoft customer data. A few months back the EU investigated Microsoft for privacy violations. To quote: “Bloomberg reports that Microsoft’s recent service agreement update to its online services has caught the eye of data privacy watchdogs in the EU. The data protection commission, led by Luxembourg and France, sent a letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer detailing the investigation.”

Luxembourg is where Microsoft took Skype from, reportedly putting back doors in the software after the acquisition. █

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